ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY

1. ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY LECTURE 10: NEW MARXISM AND CULTURAL MATERIALISM. NEW HISTORICISM

2. Marxist, or Communist School of Theory • Karl Marx, a German philosopher and Friedrich Engels, a German sociologist founded it in England • in 1848 Marx was expelled from Germany, Engels was working for his father’s textile firm in 1840s • economic theory of Communism: calling for the state – cf. ‘communal’ – ownership instead of the private one in their Communist Manifesto (1848)

4. Communist Manifesto (1848) • main aim to bring about classless society based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange • Marxism is a materialist philosophy • not only to understand the world but to change it! • progress is coming through the struggle for power between different social classes • history is class struggle • in 19th century, exploitation of one social class, the workers (cf. proletariat), by the capitalists – results in alienation due to the fragmented repetitive tasks (”cogs in a wheel,” later ”hands”)

5. Communist Manifesto (1848) • ”A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.” • ”Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” • “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”

6. Marxist model of society: the superstructure is determined by the base

7. Marxist Literary Criticism • no real theory – literature was meant to be a part of the base determined superstructure • critics pay attention to the writer’s social class and its prevailing ideology • key terms: class-bias, ideology, class struggle, progress of society • e.g. in 1930s Leninist-Marxist Criticism had rigid notions on literature: it should be ”Party literature” (Lenin) – socialist realism and state-control • Engelsian Marxist Criticism was more relaxed about new styles (see Russian Formalists and Frankfurt School)

8. New Marxism • based on the Marxist Criticism of Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Bertold Brecht • Frankfurt School (from 1930s): neo-Marxist theories of Max Horkheimer, T. W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas • from 1970s the most influential ones are Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Terry Eagleton, and Fredric Jameson

9. Louis Althusser • emphasises the connection bw. the economic base and the superstructure • the base not totally determine culture, art has a degree of independence, a relative autonomy • ideology: ”a system of representations (images, myths, ideas, or concepts) endowed with an existence and a historical role at the heart of a class in a given society” • state power (by repressive structures) vs. state control (by ideological structures)

10. Basics of critical approach in literature • ”overt” (manifest) vs. ”covert” (latent) contents of the works • social-class status of the writer is important • whole genre can be explained by the social class bias E.g. tragedy speaks for monarchy, or, the novel for the middle-class – Defoe’s Robinson as ”homo economicus” (see Ian Watt, The Rise of theNovel)

11. Raymond Williams, from Marxism and Literature (1977), Part 1, Chapter 3, ”Literature” CP102-6 • he defines literature as a concept • he takes the naive (classical?) definition – ‘full, central, immediate human experience’ – and criticises it on theoretical and historical basis • theoretically, literature is ideological • historically, ‘literature’ is related to literacy (cf. Latin littera, letters) and cultured classes

12. Raymond William, ”Literature” 2 3 tendencies in the development of the concept of literature: • from 17th c. shift from ‘learning’ to ‘taste’ or ‘sensibility’ in connection with the rise of the middle-class (bourgeoisie) + birth of criticism • specialisation of ‘literature’ to ‘creative’, ‘imaginative’ works + ‘aesthetic’ response to capitalism with the cult of the ‘artistic’ & beauty • growth of national literatures + elaboration of the concept of ‘tradition’ and ‘classical’

13. Raymond William, ”Literature” 3 • Marxist tradition is to reduce literature to ideology, to include popular genres and to relate literature to its own socio-economic and historical context + new trends! • summary: emphasis on literature ”as a specializing social and historical category”, ”a key concept of a major phase of a culture” and ”a decisive evidence of a particular form of the social development of language” (CP 106??) • today new means of production with new forms of ‘literature’ (electronic transmission and recording of speech and writing)

14. Cultural Materialism • similarly to New Historicism, studies historical material – literature as well – within a politicised framework • pays attention to the historical context of literary works • theoretically, it is rather structuralist • politically, influenced by Marxist and feminist perspectives • textually, prominent national and cultural icons are analysed; e.g. Political Shakespeare by Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore (1985)

15. Cultural Materialism 2 • culture means variety of forms, e.g. TV programmes, pop music, pulp fiction • materialist and Marxist: culture is taken as not independent of the base but not simply its reflection – not totally defined by the base • influenced by the Marxist Raymond Williams’ ”structures of feeling”: antagonistic to explicit systems of values and to dominant ideologies within a society (e.g. Dickens’ or the Brontës’ criticism of their Victorian context)

16. New Historicism • influenced by poststructuralism, mainly by Derrida’s ”textualised reality” • neglects previous discussions of the literary work, it is less overtly polemical • method: to juxtapose, to put side by side, literary and non-literary texts, reading the former in the light of the latter • to defamiliarise the canonical literary texts • focus on state power and its discourses --- see Foucault’s ideas

17. Michel Foucault on state power • image of the powerful state is like Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (circular designed prison with a watch-tower in the centre) • metaphor of modern state of all-seeing control with its prisonlike institutions (e.g. schools, hospitals, employments, legal system, religions etc.) • ”thought control” (see Orwell’s 1984) makes different and deviant thinking impossible • thought control is carried through discursive practices, discourses

19. Michel Foucault on state power 2 • discourse: whole mental set and ideology, enclosing and controlling the thinking of all members of a given society (e.g. laws, education, official records, social categories, other codes, regulations, genders etc.) • not citizens, subjects: subjected to power • power speaks in its discourses as it is diffused in all segments of modern societies • power is decentralised and depersonalised • power has its (own) truth, ”truth is power” (CP 130) – Marxist Truth and Power from 1970s

20. New Historicism in Criticism • the American Stephen Greenblatt ‘coined’ the term in 1980s (historicist, not historical) • it is based on parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts of the given period • equality: no background or foreground texts • ”the textuality of history, the historicity of texts” (Louis Montrose) – history-as-text • political, historical, medical or legal documents are used as co-texts, not con-texts • the word of the past, not the world of the past

21. Stephen Greenblatt, from The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (1980s) • Richard II is traditionally read as a hymn to the Tudors – old historicist reading • an anecdote is used to highlight why a scene was left out from Shakespeare’s Richard II (till 1603) – new historicist reading • the Queen took the scene of deposition as a threat in 1601 (time of the Essex rising) • the network of texts written in a given period of culture reflects the age (CP133A)

22. American political pessimism concentrates on power and its control poststructuralist approach awareness of uncertainties of knowledge co-texts are documents, situating the text in its own day British political optimism concentrates on people’s making their own history (Marxist) formalist or structuralist (close-reading) creative, novelistic style it situates the text in our days New Historicism vs. Cultural Materialism

23. + Terry Eagleton on ”The Rise of English” • from his famous Marxist Literary Theory (1983) • English was introduced in the Victorian England by the bourgeoise • English literature as the new religion and ”middle-class ideology” (new morality) • poor man’s classics with educational purposes • lots of women studied it – feminine feature • later, national pride was attached to it – taken to Oxbridge as a subject • in the post-war time, it had a consoling, community holdingforce

24. + Marxist Critics on Utopia and Science Fiction • proto-Marxist genres? – think of Thomas More’s ‘communist’ Utopia, or, ”Utopian Socialism” (Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon) • Utopia: the imagined perfect state is also an ideological construction and related to the present • SF is ”not to give us ‘images’ of the future[…] but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our present” (Fredric Jameson) • Carl Freedman emphasises the dialectical and historical character of the two genres • Darko Suvin’s famous definition of Science Fiction: “the literature of cognitive estrangement”