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Title: Marxism 3: Methodologies and Marxist Literary Theorists


1
Marxism 3 Methodologies and Marxist Literary
Theorists

2
Marxism Focuses
  • Dialectic Materialism -- Marx and Vulgar Marxism
  • Literature,Society Ideology Althusser and
    Gramsci
  • Marxist Literary Theorists Macherey, Jameson
    and Eagleton
  • Foucault ????????????

3
Althusser 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?

4
Methodologies 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.

5
Methodologies Some Suggestions (2)
  1. Class relations, economic determinism
  2. Critique of Capitalist Society and Consumption
    Habits (e.g. overall commodification)
  3. 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

6
Pierre 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)

7
Pierre 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)

8
the 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.

9
the 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.

10
the 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.

11
Pierre 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)

12
Terry Eagletons Materialist Criticism
  • General Ideology (GI)
  • Authorial Ideology (AuI)
    Aesthetic Ideology (AI)
  • Literary Mode of Production (LMP)
  • General Mode of Production (GMP)

The Text
13
Modes 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.

14
General 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)

15
T. 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

16
T. 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)

17
The 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.

18
Reading (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).

19
Reading (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

20
T. 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.

21
T. 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.

22
T. 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)

23
Eagleton 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.

24
Eliots 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. )

25
Materialist 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
26
Jamesons 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.)

27
Macherey 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.

28
Macherey on History
  • work response to ideological question
  • ideological
    response
  • to
    history
  • (the question behind the question).

29
Eagleton on history
  • Text Signifier Signification
  • Signified
  • IDEOLOGY
    Signifier

  • Signified

  • History
  • The relation between text and ideology like that
    between theatric performance and a play.

30
Jameson 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)

31
References
  • 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)

32
Next 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)
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