Title: Marxism 3: Methodologies and Marxist Literary Theorists
1Marxism 3 Methodologies and Marxist Literary
Theorists
2Marxism Focuses
- Dialectic Materialism -- Marx and Vulgar Marxism
- Literature,Society Ideology Althusser and
Gramsci - Marxist Literary Theorists Macherey, Jameson
and Eagleton - Foucault ????????????
3Althusser and Gramsci Q A
- How does Althusser revise traditional marxism?
- How are Althusser and Gramsci similar to and
different from each other in their views of
ideology/hegemony? Which do you agree with more?
- How do they help us understand literature more?
4Methodologies Some Suggestions
- Class relations, economic determinism and the
influences of (literary) relations of production
in or of the texts - Critique of Capitalist Society and Consumption
Habits (e.g. overall commodification) - Art and ideology contradictions within some
ideologies or between ideologies and reality in a
text or a group of texts.
5Methodologies Some Suggestions (2)
- Class relations, economic determinism
- Critique of Capitalist Society and Consumption
Habits (e.g. overall commodification) - Art and ideology
- 1. Social Reflection vs. Pierre Machereys the
Textual Unsaid - 3. Ideology Eagletons Materialist Criticism
- 2. Jameson Three horizons of interpretation
- Their views on History
6Pierre Macherey the split text the textual
unsaid
- Reflectionism chap 5 p. 87 90-91)
- A text is as split as a Lacanian subject.
- Split between its overt (or intended) meaning and
its unconscious or the hidden (and unintended)
meaning caused by - literary form (e.g. Prufrock as a Dramatic
Monologue) - contradictions in ideologies (e.g. T.S.
Eliots) - the material conditions of production in the
society in which the text is produced and
consumed. (Modernist Society)
7Pierre Macherey the textual unsaid/unconscious
- Is constructed in the moment of its entry into
literary form. - ? literary genre as a constraint
- the critics do not look for unity, but for
the multiplicity and diversity of its possible
meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which
it displays but cannot describe, and above all
its contradictions. (Belsey 109)
8the textual unsaid example 1
- Sherlock Holmes ????
- Its pattern enigma followed by disclosure (with
total explicitness and scientific spirit) by the
investigator. - The stories are haunted by shadowy, mysterious
and silent women. - The women have to be kept in the dark, so that
the ability to scientifically analyze and
interpret the evidence is the mans.
9the textual unsaid example 2
- 1999 Notting hill -- cultural
stereotypes(source http//www.scholars.nus.edu.sg
/literature/althusserandmacherey.html ) Hugh
Grant's repressed British mannerisms are
contrasted to Julia Roberts' more laid-back
American behaviour Grant as an underdoga mere
second-hand bookstoore owner hoping to have a
relationship with a movie star.
10the textual unsaidNotting hill
- Notting Hill, has a large population of Caribbean
immigrants. Most Londoners would associate
Notting Hill with its yearly carnival, a
celebration of Black British culture. - The film the only black -- an American movie
producer. Race is an unconscious element of
the movie, and at the same time "what it cannot
say." - ? the film subscribes to the ideology of
Englishness.
11Pierre Macherey (for reference)
- We should question the work as to what it does
not and cannot say, in those silences for which
it has been made. The concealed order of the work
is thus less significant than its real
determinant disorder (its disarray). The order
which it professes is merely an imagined order,
projected onto disorder, the fictive resolution
of ideological conflicts, a resolution so
precarious that it is obvious in the very letter
of the text where incoherence and incompleteness
burst forth This distance which separates the
work from the ideology which it transforms is
rediscovered in the very letter of the work it
is fissured, unmade even in its making. (Pierre
Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production 115)
12Terry Eagletons Materialist Criticism
- General Ideology (GI)
- Authorial Ideology (AuI)
Aesthetic Ideology (AI) - Literary Mode of Production (LMP)
- General Mode of Production (GMP)
The Text
13Modes of production General and Literary
- General Mode of Production (GMP) and Literary
Mode of Production (LMP) - Every LMP is constituted by structure of
production, distribution, exchange, and
consumption (? Foucault and ? later) - It's important to analyse the complex
articulations of these various LMPs with the
'general' mode of production of a social
formation. For instance, how oral LMP can keep
its traces in a written text. - E.g. circulating library in the Victorian age,
oral traces in novel and dramatic monologue
traditional novel vs. hyper-fiction web page.
14General Ideology (GI), Authorial Ideology (AuI)
and Aesthetic Ideology (AI)
- GI is not an "ideal type of ideology in
general," but the dominant ensemble of ideologies
in social formation (54). (e.g. Modernist
Ideology alienation, individualism, liberal
humanism, elitism, etc. ) - AuI is the effect of the author's mode of
biographical insertion into GI. (elitism ?
Eliots emphasis on individual talents and
tradition his critique of capitalist society
his fear of woman) - Aesthetic ideology
- (e.g. of dramatic monologue, stream of
consciousness)
15T. S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock
- What is the poem about? How do you characterize
Prufrock? What stages does he go through in
this poem? - Who is the you he talks to? And the we that
drown? - How does dramatic monologue help present the
ideas of this poem? What ideologies does the
poem criticize, support and/or embody? - Eliots reading
16T. S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock
- Five parts (composes of fragments)
- 1. Decision Let us go then (other city
room) - 2. Procrastination And indeed there will be
time. (room other they self
questions/manners/dress) - 3. Destination described, Self Doubted For I
have known them all . . . (other formulas and
ornaments self coffee spoons, butt-ends, not
crab or prophet, etc.) - 4. More Doubt And would it have been worth it.
. .(self rituals, Lazarus, nerves other one - 5. Self-Rejection No, I am not Prince Hamlet
(self the Fool, we? other mermaid)
17The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock --dramatic
monologue
- A genre in which self-centeredness is both
foregrounded and critiqued. - But the self is usually coherent.
- Prufrock fragments of objects, rituals and
questions, self-images.
18Reading (1) Prufrocks Self vs. Society
- Self-aware
- speaks to himself
- worries about his reputation (like the man from
the inferno) - of his appearance (prepare a face)
- Indecisive there will be time. (vs. To His
Coy Mistress) - Good-intentioned (with love)
- The city
- Sick and dirty, (evening, back street, sawdust
restaurant, fog smoke,) - 2. The polite society
- good-mannered, ritualistic (plate, toast, tea,
etc.), but superficial and judgmental (the eyes
that fix you).
19Reading (2) Prufrock Self-Pity vs. Self-Love
- 1. The city
- --working class invisible
- -- etherized evening
- 2. The Universe turned into a ball
- 3. The other mermaid something mythically
remote and romantic. ? anticipate Eliots
interest in classical culture. - 4. The Lady unknown and inexpressive.
- Self-Centered projects his spiritual malaise on
his physical environment - John the Baptist Lazarus
- Self-Rejectionthe self he rejects is the social
self, which is no different from the others in
society
20T. S. Eliots authorial ideologies
- Son of an aristocratic St. Louis family
- His Aesthetic Ideology A poet must take as his
material his own language as it is actually
spoken around him. --Correlatively, the duty of
the poet, as Eliot emphasized in a 1943 lecture,
is only indirectly to the people his direct
duty is to his language, first to preserve, and
second to extend and improve.--Thus he
dismisses the so-called social function of
poetry.
21T. S. Eliot and Women (1) His Wife
- Vivien Haigh-Wood, the pretty but nervous English
girl . - She ended in madness, a development which in
retrospect seems inevitable but for which Eliot
felt partially responsible and for which he
forgave himself only in old age, if ever. - This burden is the biographical shadow behind a
motif recurrent in the poems and plays--the motif
of "doing a girl in," of wife murder. (Also,
sense of alienation) - Eliots struggle to cope emotionally and
financially with Vivien Eliot's illness leads
him first to exhaustion, and then, in 1921, to
collapse.
22T. S. Eliot and Women (2) Possible gay tendency?
- Eliot on The Waste Land Various critics have
done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms
of criticism of the contemporary world, have
considered it, indeed, as an important bit of
social criticism. To me, it was only a personal
and wholly insignificant grouse against life it
is just a piece of rhythmic grumbling." ? "The
Waste Land" as an elegy to a male lover, Jean
Verdenal, who died in WWI and to whom Eliot
dedicated Prufrock and Other Observations in
1917. (Eliot qtd in Flanzbaum) - New biography (2005)
- never consummated his marriage to Vivien only
saw his wife once between 1932 and 1947. - valued his friendships with men more than his
relationships with women. - Yet Eliot preferred his mother to his father and
had an important friendship with Virginia Woolf.
(Flanzbaum)
23Eagleton on Eliot
- Totality and Tradition Goes to Europe with a
mission of re-defining the organic unity of its
cultural traditions, and reinserting provincial
England into that totality. - The organic unity of late Romanticism
classicism the surrender of personality to
order, reason, authority and tradition. - 2. A latent contradiction between Eliots
concern for art as organic order and his
insistence on the sensuously mimetic properties
of poetic language. (e.g. Traditional and
Individual Talent vs. Love Song) - 3. The metaphysical poets as a solution.
- 4. The Waste Land Cultures collapse, but
Culture survives, and its form is The Waste Land.
24Eliots views of culture and traditionculture as
religion (for reference)
- Culture - that which makes life worth living'
one's total way of life, including art and
education, but also cooking and sports. - By tradition, also, Eliot means both a conscious
and an unconscious life in a social continuum....
He speaks of culture metaphorically as the
incarnation' of a religion, the human
manifestation of a superhuman reality. A
culture's religion should mean for the
individual and for the group something toward
which they strive, not merely something which
they possess. (Contemporary Authors Online,
Gale, 2003. )
25Materialist Criticism on Prufrock
- (GI)-Fragmentation/Alienation of Selves
- (AuI)Tradition (fear of woman)
(AI) Monologuists subjectivity/ -
Cubism/ love song - (LMPLiterary Circle) The fact that these things
occurred to the mind of Mr Eliot is surely of the
very smallest importance to anyone, even to
himself. They certainly have no relation to
poetry" (1917) - (GMP) Exploitation of Laborers (the unsaid) vs.
Polite Society Prufrock-Littau (furniture
wholesalers) vs. J. Afred
The Text
26Jamesons three horizons of criticism
- from immanent analysis to transcendent one
- 1. Structuralist analysis (e.g. binaries) a
level of immanent analysis, text as a symbolic
act - 2. Ideology analysis a level of socio-discourse
analysis, text as class discourse - 3. an epochal level of Historical reading text
as being embedded in a field of forces of the
dynamic of various sign systems. (The textual
heterogeneity can only be understood only as it
relates to social and cultural heterogeneity
outside the text.)
27Macherey on History
- the work is the writers response to a situation
it is an answer to a problem/question he sets
himself and he can be ideologically aware of
what this question is. The real problem, however,
is the question of that question the first
question is already an answer to another question
the first question (the one the writer might be
aware of) is an ideologically conditioned
question posed by the writers historical
situation.
28Macherey on History
- work response to ideological question
-
- ideological
response - to
history - (the question behind the question).
29Eagleton on history
- Text Signifier Signification
- Signified
- IDEOLOGY
Signifier -
Signified -
-
History - The relation between text and ideology like that
between theatric performance and a play.
30Jameson on History
- History as an absent cause
- "it History is inaccessible except through
textual forms. and . . . our approach to it and
to the Real itself necessarily passes through its
prior textualization, its narrativization in the
political unconscious." (33)
31References
- British Writers. Supplement 5. George Stade and
Sarah Hannah Goldstein, editors. Charles
Scribners Sons, 1999. - Terry Eagleton Criticism and Ideology.
- Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (New York
Methuen, 1980) - Flanzbaum, Hilene. Eliot's troubled
sexuality.(T.S. Eliot The Making of an American
Poet)(Book review). English Literature in
Transition 1880-1920, Wntr 2007 v50 i1 p120(5)
32Next Week
- Another View on Society M. Foucault's Views on
Discourse and Power (Reader chap 7 pp. 147-57) - Girl Interrupted
- ("Faces of Madnessmaybe later or for reference)