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Writing with artificial intelligence, marxist criticism.

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Marxist Criticism refers to a method you'll encounter in literary and cultural analysis. It breaks down texts and societal structures using foundational concepts like class, alienation, base, and superstructure. By understanding this, you'll gain insights into how power dynamics and socio-economic factors influence narratives and cultural perspectives

Table of Contents

What is Marxist Criticism?

Marxist Criticism refers to both

• an interpretive framework
• a genre of discourse .

Marxist Criticism as both a theoretical approach and a conversational genre within academic discourse . Critics using this framework analyze literature and other cultural forms through the lens of Marxist theory, which includes an exploration of how economic and social structures influence ideology and culture. For example, a Marxist reading of a novel might explore how the narrative reinforces or challenges the existing social hierarchy and economic inequalities.

Marxist Criticism prioritizes four foundational Marxist concepts:

• class struggle
• the alienation of the individual under capitalism
• the relationship between a society’s economic base and
• its cultural superstructure.

Related Concepts

Dialectic ; Hermeneutics ; Literary Criticism ; Semiotics ; Textual Research Methods

Why Does Marxist Criticism Matter?

Marxist criticism thus emphasizes class, socioeconomic status, power relations among various segments of society, and the representation of those segments. Marxist literary criticism is valuable because it enables readers to see the role that class plays in the plot of a text.

What Are the Four Primary Perspectives of Marxism?

Did Karl Marx Create Marxist Criticism?

Karl Marx himself did not create Marxist criticism as a literary or cultural methodology . He was a philosopher, economist, and sociologist, and his works laid the foundation for Marxist theory in the context of social and economic analysis. The key concepts that Marx developed—such as class struggle, the theory of surplus value, and historical materialism—are central to understanding the mechanisms of capitalism and class relations.

Marxist criticism as a distinct approach to literature and culture developed later, as thinkers in the 20th century began to apply Marx’s ideas to the arts and humanities. It is a product of various scholars and theorists who found Marx’s social theories to be useful tools for analyzing and critiquing literature and culture. These include figures such as György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, and later the Frankfurt School, among others, who expanded Marxist theory into the realms of ideology, consciousness, and cultural production.

So, while Marx provided the ideological framework, it was later theorists who adapted his ideas into what is now known as Marxist criticism.

Who Are the Key Figures in Marxist Theory?

Bressler notes that “Marxist theory has its roots in the nineteenth-century writings of Karl Heinrich Marx, though his ideas did not fully develop until the twentieth century” (183).

Key figures in Marxist theory include Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, and Louis Althusser. Although these figures have shaped the concepts and path of Marxist theory, Marxist literary criticism did not specifically develop from Marxism itself. One who approaches a literary text from a Marxist perspective may not necessarily support Marxist ideology.

For example, a Marxist approach to Langston Hughes’s poem “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria” might examine how the socioeconomic status of the speaker and other citizens of New York City affect the speaker’s perspective. The Waldorf Astoria opened during the midst of the Great Depression. Thus, the poem’s speaker uses sarcasm to declare, “Fine living . . . a la carte? / Come to the Waldorf-Astoria! / LISTEN HUNGRY ONES! / Look! See what Vanity Fair says about the / new Waldorf-Astoria” (lines 1-5). The speaker further expresses how class contributes to the conflict described in the poem by contrasting the targeted audience of the hotel with the citizens of its surrounding area: “So when you’ve no place else to go, homeless and hungry / ones, choose the Waldorf as a background for your rags” (lines 15-16). Hughes’s poem invites readers to consider how class restricts particular segments of society.

What are the Foundational Questions of Marxist Criticism?

• What classes, or socioeconomic statuses, are represented in the text?
• Are all the segments of society accounted for, or does the text exclude a particular class?
• Does class restrict or empower the characters in the text?
• How does the text depict a struggle between classes, or how does class contribute to the conflict of the text?
• How does the text depict the relationship between the individual and the state? Does the state view individuals as a means of production, or as ends in themselves?

Example of Marxist Criticism

• The Working Class Beats: a Marxist analysis of Beat Writing and (studylib.net)

Discussion Questions and Activities: Marxist Criticism

• Define class, alienation, base, and superstructure in your own words.
• Explain why a base determines its superstructure.
• Choose the lines or stanzas that you think most markedly represent a struggle between classes in Langston Hughes’s “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria.” Hughes’s poem also addresses racial issues; consider referring to the relationship between race and class in your written response.
• Contrast the lines that appear in quotation marks and parentheses in Hughes’s poem. How do these lines differ? Does it seem like the lines in parentheses respond to the lines in quotation marks, the latter of which represent excerpts from an advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria published in Vanity Fair? How does this contrast illustrate a struggle between classes?
• What is Hughes’s purpose for writing “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria?” Defend your interpretation with evidence from the poem.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Marxist Literary Criticism: An Overview

Marxist Literary Criticism: An Overview

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on January 22, 2018 • ( 2 )

Marx and Engels produced no systematic theory of literature or art. Equally, the subsequent history of Marxist aesthetics has hardly comprised the cumulative unfolding of a coherent perspective. Rather, it has emerged, aptly, as a series of responses to concrete political exigencies. While these responses have sometimes collided at various theoretical planes, they achieve a dynamic and expansive coherence (rather than the static coherence of a closed, finished system) through both a general overlap of political motivation and the persistent reworking of a core of predispositions about literature and art deriving from Marx and Engels themselves. These predispositions include:

(1) The rejection, following Hegel, of the notion of “identity” and a consequent denial of the view that any object, including literature, can somehow exist independently. The aesthetic corollary of this is that literature can only be understood in the fullness of its relations with ideology, class, and economic substructure.

(2) The view that the so-called “objective” world is actually a progressive construction out of collective human subjectivity. What passes as “truth,” then, is not eternal but institutionally created. “Private property,” for example, is a bourgeois reification of an abstract category; it does not necessarily possess eternal validity. Language itself, as Marx said in The German Ideology: Part One, must be understood not as a self-sufficient system but as social practice (GI, 51, 118).

(3) The understanding of art itself as a commodity, sharing with other commodities an entry into material aspects of production. If, as Marx said, human beings produce themselves through labor, artistic production can be viewed as a branch of production in general.

(4) A focus on the connections between class struggle as the inner dynamic of history and literature as the ideologically refracted site of such struggle. This has sometimes gone hand in hand with prescriptions for literature as an ideological ancillary to the aims and results of political revolution.

(5) An insistence that language is not a self-enclosed system of relations but must be understood as social practice, as deeply rooted in material conditions as any other practice (GI, 51).

To these predispositions could be added, for example, Engels’ comments on “typicality,” recommending that art should express what is typical about a class or a peculiar intersection of ideological circumstances. One might also include the problem raised by Engels’ granting a “relative autonomy” to art, his comments that art can transcend its ideological genesis and that superstructural elements are determined only in the “last instance” by economic relations: what exactly is the connection between art and the material base into which its constituting relations extend? Given the inconclusive and sometimes ambiguous nature of Marx’s and Engels’ scattered comments on art, the proposed solutions to such dilemmas have been as various as the political soils on which they were sown.

After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels’ attempt to shed light on his colleague’s aesthetic views was less assiduous than his clarifications of other aspects of Marx’s work. As Europe witnessed a widespread nascence of socialist political parties, together with the impact of Marxism in sociology, anthropology, history, and political science, the first generation of Marxist intellectuals included the Italian Antonio Labriola (1843–1904), who attempted the first effective synthesis of Marx’s thought and popularized the premises of Marxism. His works , translated into all the major European languages, exerted enormous influence and made a particularly striking impression on Georgi Plekhanov , who introduced his work to Russia, as well as on Lenin and Trotsky. In his Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History (1895–1896) Labriola reaffirms Marx’s premise that (material) being determines consciousness rather than vice versa but takes some pains to emphasize that while legal and political systems are “a true and proper projection of economic conditions . . . in artistic or religious production the mediation from the conditions to the products is very complicated.” Hence, although art and ideas can have no independent history, they are themselves a part of history in the sense that they too are a causal agency in subsequent economic and superstructural developments.

Another star in the firmament of early Marxist theory was the Prussian-born Franz Mehring (1846–1919). A one-time follower of Ferdinand Lassalle, Mehring became an outstanding Marxist historian and aesthetician who, along with Rosa Luxemburg and others, founded the German Communist Party in 1918. His writings included the first authoritative biography of Marx, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (1918), and The Lessing-Legend (1892–1893), which both applied Marxist categories to the analysis of major German literary figures and brought these within the reach of working-class readers. Mehring attempted to situate Marxist aesthetics, and Marxist thought in general, in necessary relation to the German classical philosophy and aesthetics which had preceded it. This elicited censure from such figures as Paul Reimann and F. P. Schiller, and later from György Lukács, who saw Mehring as a reactionary ideologue. There is much in Mehring which might justify such a response. One of the central questions he confronts is: how are objective aesthetic judgments possible, given the subjectivity of taste? Mehring urges that a “scientific aesthetics” must demonstrate, as Kant did, that art is “a peculiar and aboriginal capacity of mankind.” But Lukács somewhat overlooks Mehring’s account of Kant’s weaknesses: Kant’s inability, for example, to recognize that his aesthetic laws were historically conditioned and that a “pure” aesthetic judgment, dirempted from logical and moral considerations, was impossible. Moreover, Mehring’s analyses of specific literary texts bear out his view that, like all ideology, literary criticism must ultimately be determined by economic infrastructure.

German Marxist theory found a further advocate in Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), whose preeminence endured till around 1915. A propagandist for the Social Democratic Party, he founded in 1883 a prestigious Marxist journal, Die Neue Zeit , which offered a forum for the elaboration of Marx’s economic and political thought. His works included Karl Marx’s Economic Teachings (1887) and The Foundations of Christianity  (1908). In the 1880s he produced a number of reflections on art such as “Development in Art,” “Art and Society,” and “Artist and Worker.” In The Foundations of Christianity Kautsky, typifying his method, showed how religious ideas are tied to the levels of artistic and industrial maturity allowed by a particular economic substructure. He developed the thesis that the major monotheistic religions arose in nations bound by a nomadic way of life; they had not developed the industry or art necessary to construct the localized human images of deities which facilitated polytheism. Ironically, these more backward cultures could make a leap beyond polytheism to a higher form of religion whose progress was retarded in more advanced societies.

Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918), the “father of Russian Marxism,” was a founder of the Russian Social Democratic Party. His writings include Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883) and Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1908), as well as his highly influential Art and Social Life (1912) and some shorter pieces such as The Role of the Individual in History (1898). In the last of these he argues that the role of gifted individuals, such as Napoleon, in history has been exaggerated. Plekhanov’s own position is that such persons appear “wherever and whenever” social conditions facilitate their development: “every talent which becomes a social force, is the fruit of social relations.” Moreover, individuals can change only the individual character, not the general direction, of events. Hence particular trends in art or literature do not depend exclusively on certain individuals for their expression; if the trend is sufficiently profound, it will compensate the premature death of one individual by giving rise to other talents who might embody it. The depth of a literary trend is determined by its significance for the class whose tastes it expresses, and by the social role of that class. In Art and Social Life Plekhanov raises the crucial question of the relative values of “art for art’s sake” and a “utilitarian” view of art which sees it as instrumental in promoting the improvement of the social order. Plekhanov refuses to approach this question by abstractly asserting the priority of one or the other. Rather, he inquires into the principal social conditions in which each of these attitudes arises and arrives at the thesis that the “art for art’s sake” tendency arises when an artist is “in hopeless disaccord with the social environment.” The utilitarian attitude, which grants art a function in social struggles as well as the power of judgment concerning the real world, “arises and becomes stronger wherever a mutual sympathy exists between the individuals . . . interested in artistic creation and some considerable part of society.”7

Another area in which Plekhanov pioneered a Marxist standpoint was the significance of “play,” whereby human beings pursue an activity not for its usefulness but simply for pleasure. Plekhanov believed that Karl Bucher ’s theory that in primitive cultures play and art preceded labor and the production of useful objects was a test case for the materialist explanation of history. If Bucher were right, the Marxist explanation would be turned upside down. As against Bucher , Plekhanov, following Herbert Spencer, maintains that play is a dramatization and imitation of labor or useful activity. Hence utilitarian activity precedes play and is what determines its content. The implications of Plekhanov’s comments on play were not taken up systematically by a Marxist until Herbert Marcuse ’s Eros and Civilization appeared in 1955.

One of the most striking figures in the Marxist canon was Rosa Luxemburg (1870– 1919). Born into a Jewish business background in Poland, she migrated to Germany where she joined the Social Democratic Party, rising to a lofty prominence until her assassination in 1919. Her most renowned contribution was The Accumulation of Capital (1913). Centrally concerned with the reasons behind the stagnation and lack of development of Marxist theory, she was also anxious to preserve an aesthetic dimension for art, a recalcitrance to what she saw as reductive analysis. While acknowledging that both Dostoyevsky’s and Tolstoy’s doctrines were reactionary and mystical, she nevertheless praised their liberating effects on the reader and their profound response to social injustice. Luxemburg justified this by urging that the “social formula” recommended by an artist was secondary to the source or animating spirit of the art. The starting points of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, she affirmed, were not reactionary. She urged that a working-class culture could not be produced within a bourgeois economic framework, and that the workers could only advance if they created for themselves the necessary intellectual weapons in their struggle for liberation. Luxemburg believed that Marx provided much more than was directly essential for practically conducting the class war and that the theoretical fruits of his system could only be realized more gradually. Evident here is the implication that, in Luxemburg’s eyes, the superstructural world of art, law, and ethics cannot be appropriated by the revolutionary class in a manner consonant with the general displacement of the bourgeois political apparatus but must evolve, lagging slowly behind those more prosaic shifts in economic substructure.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) occupied a central role not only in the revolution of 1917 but also in the unfolding of Marxist aesthetics toward a more politically interventionist stance. In the latter respect, Lenin’s most celebrated and controversial piece is his Party Organization and Party Literature  (1905), which, along with certain comments of Marx and Engels, was later misleadingly claimed to authorize “socialist realism,” adopted in 1934 as the official party aesthetic. But hostile, non-Marxist critics have also misinterpreted Lenin’s essay, viewing it as an attempt to repress free creativity in literature. Such a view overlooks both the context in which the essay was conceived and its actual arguments. Written shortly after the general strike of October 1905, it belongs to a politically volatile period in which the work of revolution was far from complete, as Lenin emphasizes: “While tsarism is no longer strong enough to defeat the revolution, the revolution is not yet strong enough to defeat tsarism.”8 Moreover, free speech and a free press, as Lenin points out, did not in any case exist. It can come as no surprise, then, that Lenin insists that literature “must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘a cog and screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” Lenin is well aware that art cannot be “subject to mechanical adjustment or levelling, to the rule of the majority over the minority.” But he is not prescribing partisanship (partinost) for all literature, only literature which claims to be party literature. He grants that freedom “of speech and the press must be complete.” What he is suggesting is that “freedom of association” must also be complete: the party reserves the right to circumscribe the ideological boundaries of writing conducted under its banner. Lenin also points out that in bourgeois society the writer cherishes but an illusory freedom: “The freedom of the bourgeois writer . . . is simply masked . . . dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution.” The writers imagine themselves to be free but are actually dependent upon an entire prescriptive network of commercial relations and interests, “prisoners of bourgeois-shopkeeper literary relations.” In contrast, the free literature that Lenin desires “will be openly linked to the proletariat.” Also underscoring Lenin’s arguments is his recognition that literature “cannot . . . be an individual undertaking,” as liberal-bourgeois individualism would have us believe (149–152).

Lenin’s Articles on Tolstoy, produced between 1908 and 1911, exemplify through their detailed analyses both the political urgency informing Lenin’s aesthetic approach and his ability to explain the circumstances limiting the potential partisanship of great writers. According to Lenin, the contradictions in Tolstoy’s works – for example, his “ruthless criticism of capitalist exploitation,” his denunciation of “poverty, degradation and misery among the toiling masses” as against his “crazy preaching of ‘resist not evil’ with violence” and his preaching of a reformed religion – mirror the contradictory conditions of the revolutionary peasantry (9). Tolstoy’s misguided renunciation of politics reflected the “seething hatred, a mature striving for a better lot, a desire to get rid of the past – and also immature dreaming, political ignorance and revolutionary flabbiness” characterizing the peasantry (14). But while Tolstoy’s doctrines are “certainly utopian,” Lenin is able to call them “socialistic” and to hail Tolstoy’s portrayal of the epoch of revolution as “a step forward in the artistic development of the whole of mankind” (16). Lenin’s methodological insights are equally interesting: the contradictions in Tolstoy can only be apprehended from the standpoint of the class which led the struggle for freedom during the revolution (20). This helps to put into perspective some of Lenin’s earlier comments on “Party literature”: not only is it impossible to write as an individual, but equally, “individual” acts of reading and interpreting are conducted within parameters dictated by class interests. At a deeper level, Lenin’s approach to aesthetic value, embracing as it does the totality of historical circumstances including class, preceding literary traditions, and relation to political exigency, can be seen to derive from his acknowledgment of the dialectical character of Marxism. In his Philosophical Notebooks he cites “Dialectics” as the theory of knowledge of both Hegel and Marxism, a theory which focuses on the necessary connection between the individual and the universal, the infinite expansibility through various levels of an individual’s constituting relations, as well as the connections between necessity and contingency.

It can be seen from the foregoing that the early debates on art during and after the revolutionary period in Russia focused on questions such as the degree of party control over the arts, the stance toward the bourgeois cultural legacy, and the imperative to clarify the connections between the political and the aesthetic. A related question was the possibility of creating a proletarian culture. The other major protagonist in the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), played a crucial role in these debates. His works include Lenin (1924), History of the Russian Revolution (1932), and The Revolution Betrayed (1937), as well as his renowned Literature and Revolution (1923). Trotsky, already exiled in 1900 and 1905 for his revolutionary activities, was finally ousted by Joseph Stalin in the struggle for leadership following Lenin’s death in 1904. He continued, in exile, to oppose Stalin’s regime until his murder in 1940. The literary debates were far from academic: they are indices of bitter political alignments. In Literature and Revolution Trotsky stressed that only in some domains can the party offer direct leadership; the “domain of art is not one in which the Party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but can only lead it indirectly.”9 But, just as Lenin’s views on this topic have been misread, so Trotsky’s claims for freedom of art have been subject to misprision. He states quite clearly that what is needed is “a watchful revolutionary censorship, and a broad and flexible policy in the field of art.” What is important for Trotsky is that the limits of such censorship be defined very clearly: he is against “the liberal principle of laissez faire and laissez passer, even in the field of art” (221).

Hence Trotsky cannot be accused of blatant tolerance of reactionary literature and ideas, although in a 1938 manifesto, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, drawn up in collaboration with André Breton, Trotsky urges a “complete freedom for art” while acknowledging that all true art is revolutionary in nature. The latter position was adopted in reaction to what Trotsky calls Stalin’s “police patrol spirit.”10 In Literature and Revolution Trotsky also urges that the party should give “its confidence” to what he calls “literary fellow-travelers,” those non-party writers sympathetic to the revolution. What lies behind this is Trotsky’s insistence that the proletariat cannot begin the construction of a new culture without absorbing and assimilating the elements of the old cultures (226). Given the proletariat’s need for a continuity of creative tradition, it currently “realizes this continuity . . . indirectly, through the creative bourgeois intelligentsia which gravitates towards the proletariat” (227). In the same work, Trotsky addresses the question of whether proletarian culture is possible. The question, to Trotsky, is “formless” because not only will the energy of the proletariat be directed primarily toward the acquisition of power but, as it succeeds, it “will be more and more dissolved into a Socialist community and will free itself from its class characteristics and thus cease to be a proletariat . . . The proletariat acquires power for the purpose of doing away forever with class culture and to make way for human culture” (185–186).

Other aspects of Tolstoy’s approach to aesthetics are exemplified in his speech of 1924, Class and Art.  Here, Trotsky suggests that art has “its own laws of development” and that there is no guarantee of an organic link between artistic creativity and class interests. Moreover, such creativity “lags behind” the spirit of a class and is not subject to conscious influence. Trotsky maintains that certain great writers, such as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe , appeal to us precisely because they transcend the limitations of their class outlook. Throughout his comments on aesthetics, Trotsky seems to travel a fine line between granting art a certain autonomy while viewing it as serving, in a highly mediated fashion, an important social function.

The call to create a proletarian culture was the originating theme of Proletkult, a left-wing group of artists and writers whose foremost ideologist was A. A. Bogdanov . This group, opposed by the Bolshevik leadership, insisted on art as a weapon in class struggle and rejected all bourgeois art. Also active in the debates of this period were the Formalists and the Futurists, notably the critic Osip Brik , whose term “social command” embodied the idea of interventionist art, and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky , who wrote an influential pamphlet, How Are Verses Made? The Formalists and Futurists found a common platform in the journal LEF (Left Front of Art). The Formalists, focusing on artistic forms and techniques on the basis of linguistic studies, had arisen in pre-revolutionary Russia but now saw their opposition to traditional art as a political gesture, allying them somewhat with the revolution. All of these groups were attacked by the most prominent Soviet theoreticians, such as Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1937), Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933), and Voronsky , who decried the attempt to break completely with the past and what they saw as a reductive denial of the social and cognitive aspects of art. Valentin Voloshinov (Bakhtin) later attempted to harmonize the two sides of the debate, viz., formal linguistic analysis and sociological emphasis, by treating language itself as the supreme ideological phenomenon. A further group was the Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP; later RAPP), which insisted on communist literary hegemony.

The Communist Party’s attitude toward art in this period was, in general, epiphenomenal of its economic policy. A resolution of 1925 voiced the party’s refusal to sanction any one literary faction. This reflected the New Economic Policy (NEP) of a limited free market economy. The period of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) saw a more or less voluntary return to a more committed artistic posture, and during the second Five-Year Plan (1932–1936) this commitment was crystallized in the formation of a Writers’ Union. The first congress of this union in 1934, featuring speeches by Maxim Gorky and Bukharin, officially adopted socialist realism, as defined primarily by  Andrei Zhdanov (1896–1948). Aptly dubbed by Terry Eagleton as “Stalin’s cultural thug,” it was Zhdanov whose proscriptive shadow thenceforward fell over Soviet cultural affairs. Although Nikolai Bukharin ’s speech at the congress had attempted a synthesis of Formalist and sociological attitudes, premised on his assertion that within “the microcosm of the word is embedded the macrocosm of history,” Bukharin was eventually to fall from his position as leading theoretician of the party: his trial and execution, stemming from his political and economic differences with Stalin, were also symptomatic of the fact that Formalism soon became a sin once more. Bukharin had called for socialist realism to portray not reality “as it is” but rather as it exists in socialist imagination. Zhdanov defined socialist realism as the depiction of “reality in its revolutionary development. The truthfulness . . . of the artistic image must be linked with the task of ideological transformation.”11 But, as several commentators have pointed out, despite the calls for socialist realism to express social values as embodied in the movement of history (rather than embracing a static naturalism), the actual aesthetic adopted was largely a return to nineteenth-century realist techniques infused with a socialist content.

Socialist realism received its most articulate theoretical expression in the work of the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács , the foremost Marxist aesthetician of the twentieth century. Lukács ’ ideas are examined in some detail below; here, it is necessary merely to mention that his notion of realism collided with that of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). In some ways this debate can be regarded as a collision between two personalities, or between writer (Brecht) and critic ( Lukács ), since their “definitions” of socialist realism overlap in crucial aspects, a fact which is often ignored. According to Lukács , modern capitalist society is riven by contradictions, by chasms between universal and particular, intelligible and sensible, part and whole. The realist artist expresses a vision of the possible totality embracing these contradictions, a totality achieved by embodying what is “typical” about various historical stages. For example, an individual character might enshrine an entire complex of historical forces. Brecht, in his notebooks, also equates realism with the ability to capture the “typical” or “historically significant.” Realists also identify the contradictions in human relationships, as well as their enabling conditions. Socialist realists, moreover, view reality from the viewpoint of the proletariat. Brecht adds that realist art battles false views of reality, thereby facilitating correct views.12 Perhaps the conflict between the two thinkers is rooted in Lukács ’ (arguably Stalinist-inspired) aversion to modernist and experimental art on the grounds that the ontological image of humanity it portrayed was fragmented, decadent, and politically impotent. In the 1930s Brecht’s work was viewed as tainted, though later he was received into the ranks of Marxist aestheticians. In contrast, Brecht’s experimentalism was crucial to his attempts to combine theory and practice in a Marxist aesthetic. Contrasting dramatic theater (which follows Aristotle’s guidelines) with his own “epic” theater, Brecht avers that the audience’s capacity for action must be roused and, far from undergoing katharsis, it must be forced to take decisions, partly by its standard expectations being disappointed (a procedure Brecht called “the alienation effect”). The action on stage must also implicitly point to other, alternative versions of itself. Far from being sterile, the disputes between Lukács and Brecht display the multidimensional potential of any concept approached from Marxist viewpoints as well as the inevitable grounding of those viewpoints in political circumstances.

Mention should also be made of the Italian Marxist theorist and political activist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), whose main contribution to Marxism is widely thought to lie in his elaboration of the notion of hegemony . Autonomous revolutionary potential on the part of the proletariat could only be realized, argued Gramsci, through political and intellectual autonomy. A mass movement alone was insufficient: also, initiated through a vanguard with working-class roots and sympathies, this class “must train and educate itself in the management of society,” acquiring both the culture and psychology of a dominant class through its own channels: “meetings, congresses, discussions, mutual education.”13 The transformation to a socialist state cannot be successful without the proletariat’s own organic intellectuals forging an alternative hegemony. The notion of hegemony is effectively a metonymic affirmation of the dialectical connection between economic and superstructural spheres, stressing the transformative role of human agency rather than relying on the “inevitability” of economic determinism. Gramsci wrote some thirty-four notebooks while in prison, ranging from literary topics such as Dante and Pirandello to philosophical and political themes. These were not published until after Mussolini’s downfall. Gramsci ’s literary criticism insisted on understanding literary production within its historical and political context (as against Croce’s ahistorical view of art as autonomous) and, following De Sanctis, viewed the critic’s task as one of harmonizing with the general cultural and political struggle toward a socialist order.

Later critics have continued to reinterpret and develop the insights of Marx and Engels. The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, whose leading exponents were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, produced a number of philosophical and cultural analyses informed primarily by Hegel’s work and also by Freud. In general, these theorists saw modern mass culture as regimented and reduced to a commercial dimension; and they saw art as embodying a unique critical distance from this social and political world. Walter Benjamin argued in his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that modern technology has transformed the work of art, stripping it of the “aura” of uniqueness it possessed in earlier eras. Modern works are reproduced for mass consumption, and are effectively copies which relate to no original form. However, this new status of art, thought Benjamin, also gave it a revived political and subversive potential.

Subsequent Marxist cultural and literary theory, such as that of Louis Althusser , Lucien Goldmann, and Pierre Macherey , turned away from Hegel and was heavily influenced by the structuralist movements of the earlier twentieth century, which stressed the role of larger signifying systems and institutional structures over individual agency and intention. Louis Althusser emphasized the later Marx’s “epistemological break” from his own earlier humanism, and Marx’s scientificity and his departure from, rather than his debt to, Hegel. Althusser ’s structuralist Marxism – as stated in his Pour Marx (For Marx, 1965) and his often cited Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses , rejected earlier humanist and historicist readings of Marx, as well as literary-critical emphases on authorial intention and subjective agency. Goldmann rejected the Romantic–humanist notion of individual creativity and held that texts are productions of larger mental structures representing the mentality of particular social classes. He stressed the operation of larger forces and doctrines in literary texts, and developed the notion of “homology” to register the parallels between artistic and social forms. Pierre Macherey ’s A Theory of Literary Production (1966) saw the literary text as the product of the artist’s reworking of linguistic and ideological raw material, unwittingly exposing, through its lacunae and contradictions, ideological elements which the author had attempted to suppress into a false coherence. In this way, a critique of ideology could emerge through the literary text.

In the Anglo-American world a “cultural materialist” criticism was first revived by Raymond Williams ’ work, notably Culture and Society 1780–1950, which analyzes the cultural critique of capitalism in English literary tradition. Williams rejected a simplistic explanation of culture as the efflux of material conditions, but stressed the contribution of cultural forms to economic and political development. The Long Revolution (1961) continued and refined this project using categories such as dominant, residual, and emergent cultures mediated by what Williams called “structures of feeling.” Williams’ work became overtly Marxist with the publication in 1977 of Marxism and Literature. In this work Williams undertook a critical review of earlier Marxist theories and offered his own analyses of fundamental Marxist notions such as ideology, hegemony, base and superstructure. His own cultural materialism as set forth here attempts to integrate Marxist conceptions of language and literature. Keywords (1976) examines the history of fundamental concepts and categories. In general, Williams’ work analyzed the history of language, the role of the media, mass communications, and the cultural connections between the country and the city.

The major American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson outlined a dialectical theory of literary criticism in his Marxism and Form (1971), drawing on Hegelian categories such as the notion of totality and the connection of abstract and concrete. Such criticism recognizes the need to see its objects of analysis within a broad historical context, acknowledges its own history and perspective, and seeks the profound inner form of a literary text. Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981) attempts to integrate this dialectical thinking with insights from structuralism and Freud, using the Freudian notion of repression to analyze the function of ideology, the status of literary texts, and the epistemological function of literary form. In subsequent work such as Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson performed the valuable task of extending Marx’s insights into the central role of postmodernism in determining the very form of our artistic and intellectual experience.

In Britain, Terry Eagleton has outlined the categories of a Marxist analysis of literature, and has persistently rearticulated the terms of communication, as well as the differences, between Marxism and much of modern literary theory. We can now undertake a closer examination of two Marxist critics whose ideas have been highly influential: the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács and the aforementioned critic Terry Eagleton , as his work relates to modern literary theory.

Notes 1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1952; rpt. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), pp. 11–16. Hereafter cited as MCP. 2 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1959; rpt. Moscow and London: Progress Publishers/Lawrence and Wishart, 1981), pp. 127–143. 3 Marx and Engels, On Religion (1957; rpt. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 39. 4 Marx, Capital: Volume I (1954; rpt. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), p. 29. Hereafter cited as Capital. 5 “Preface and Introduction,” in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), p. 3. Hereafter cited as CPE. 6 Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, introd. Michèle Barrett (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 105. Hereafter cited as OF. 7 George V. Plekhanov, Art and Social Life (New York: Oriole Editions, 1974), pp. 177–178. 8 V. I. Lenin, On Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967), p. 148. Hereafter citations from this volume are given in the text. 9 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell and Russell, 1924), p. 218. Hereafter citations are given in the text. 10 Leon Trotsky, Culture and Socialism and a Manifesto: Art and Revolution (London: New Park Publications, 1975), pp. 31–34. 11 A. A. Zhdanov, On Literature, Music and Philosophy (New York and London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1950), p. 15. 12 Berel Lang and Forrest Williams, eds., Marxism and Art: Writings in Aesthetics and Criticism (New York: McKay, 1972), pp. 226–227. 13 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, trans. J. Mathews, ed. Q. Hoare (New York: International Publishers, 1977), p. 171. 14 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1984), p. 93. 15 Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1981), p. 84. Hereafter cited as WB. 16 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford and Minnesota: Blackwell/ University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 208. Hereafter cited as LT. 17 Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: New Left Books, 1986), pp. 81–82. 18 See Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 8–10. 19 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 54. Hereafter cited as CI. 20 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 9. Hereafter cited as POS.

Bibliography Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zum Theater (1957, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett, 1964); V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (46 vols., 1960-70,1978), On Literature and Art (1970), Selected Works (1971); Karl Marx, Selected Writings (ed. David McLellan, 1977); Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Correspondence of Marx and Engels, 1846-1895: A Selection with Commentary and Notes (ed. and trans. Dona Torr, n.d.), The Marx-Engels Reader (2d ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker, 1978), On Literature and Art (1978); George V. Plekhanov, Art and Social Life (1970); Maynard Solomon, ed., Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (1973); Leon Trotsky, The Basic Writings of Trotsky (ed. Irving Howe, 1965), Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art (ed. Paul N. Siegel, 1970); A. A. Zhdanov, Essays on Literature, Philosophy, and Music (1950). Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (trans. Ben Brewster, 1971); Chris Bullock and David Peck, Guide to Marxist Literary Criticism (1980); Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels, and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism (trans. J. L. Sammons, 1967); Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976); Dave Laing, The Marxist Theory of Art: An Introductory Survey (1978); Cliff Slaughter, Marxism, Ideology, and Literature (1980); Robert H. Stacy, Russian Literary Criticism: A Short History (1974); Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide

Daniel Hartley

(First published in French at: http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-critique-litteraire-marxiste/ )

Marxist literary criticism investigates literature’s role in the class struggle. The best general introductions in English remain Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism (Routledge, 2002 [1976]) and, a more difficult but foundational book, Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form (Princeton UP, 1971). The best anthology in English remains Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (Blackwell, 1996). The bibliographic essay that follows does not aim to be exhaustive; because it is quite long, I have indicated what I take to be the major texts of the tradition with a double asterisk and bold font: ** .

From Marx to Stalinist Russia

It is well-known that Marx himself was a voracious reader across multiple languages and that, as a young man, he composed poetry as well as an unfinished novel and fragments of a play. S.S. Prawer’s Karl Marx and World Literature (Verso, 2011 [1976]) is the definitive guide to all literary aspects of Marx’s writings. Marx and Engels also expressed views on specific literary works or authors in various contexts. Three in particular are well known: in The Holy Family (1845), Marx and Engels submit Eugène Sue’s global bestseller The Mysteries of Paris to a rigorous literary and ideological critique, which became important for Louis Althusser’s theory of melodrama (see ‘The “Piccolo Teatro”: Bertolazzi and Brecht’ in For Marx (Verso, 2005 [1965])); both Marx and Engels sent letters to Ferdinand Lassalle, a German lawyer and socialist, expressing reservations about his play Franz von Sickingen (1858-9), which they felt had downplayed the historical role of plebeian and peasant elements in the 1522-3 uprising of the Swabian and Rheinland nobility, thereby diminishing the tragic scope of his drama and causing his characters to be two-dimensional mouthpieces of history; finally, Marx planned but never actually wrote a whole volume on Balzac’s La Comédie humaine , of which Engels said that he had ‘learned more [from it] than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together.’ Marx and Engels’ interest in Balzac is particularly important since it suggests that literary prowess and a capacity to represent the fundamental social dynamics of a given historical period are not dependent upon an author’s self-avowed political positions (Balzac was a royalist). This point would become important for theories of realism developed by György Lukács [1] and Fredric Jameson. Various fragments of Marx and Engels’ writings on art and literature have been collected by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski in Marx and Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings (Telos Press, 1973). Marx and Engels’ ultimate influence on what became ‘Marxist literary criticism’ is less a result of these isolated fragments than the historical materialist method as such.

A useful, if overly simplistic, periodisation of Marxist literary criticism has been proposed by Terry Eagleton in the introduction to his and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (Blackwell, 1996). Eagleton divides Marxist criticism into four kinds: anthropological, political, ideological, and economic (I shall focus on the first three). ‘Anthropological’ criticism, which he claims predominated during the period of the Second International (1889-1916), asks such fundamental questions as: what is the function of art within social evolution? What are the relations between art and human labour? What are the social functions of art and what is its relation to myth? This approach obtained (partially) in such works as G.V. Plekhanov’s Art and Social Life (Foreign Languages Press, 1957 [1912]) and Christopher Caudwell’s Illusion and Reality (Macmillan, 1937). ‘Political’ criticism dates to the Bolsheviks and their preparation for – and defence of – the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and, especially, 1917. Lenin’s essays on Tolstoy from 1908-11, collected in On Literature and Art (Progress Publishers, 1970), argue that the contradictions in Tolstoy’s work between advanced anti-capitalist critique and patriarchal, moralistic Christianity are a ‘mirror’ of late nineteenth-century Russian life and the weakness of residually feudal peasant elements of the 1905 revolution. (This argument was famously revisited by Pierre Macherey in his major Althusserian work of literary theory, Towards a Theory of Literary Production (Routledge Classics, 2006 [1966])). The most important text of this period, however, is almost certainly Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution** (Haymarket, 2005 [1925]). A landmark survey of the entire Russian literary terrain, it provides a unique record of the literary and stylistic upheavals brought about by social revolution. The book locates in literary forms and styles the ambiguous political tendencies of their authors, and is driven by the ultimate goal of producing a culture and collective subjectivity adequate to the construction of socialism.

This period of revolutionary ferment also gave rise to one of the most powerful and sophisticated intellectual schools in the history of Marxist literary criticism: the Bakhtin Circle. Led by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (whose own relation to the Marxist tradition is ambiguous), the Circle produced subtle philosophical analyses of the social and cultural issues posed by the Russian Revolution and its degeneration into Stalinist dictatorship. Centred around the key idea of dialogism , which holds that language and literature are formed in a dynamic, conflictual process of social interaction, the Circle distinguished between monologic forms such as epic and poetry (associated with the monologism of Stalinism itself), and the novel whose heteroglossia (a polyphonic combination of social and literary idioms) and dialogism imbue it with a critical, popular resistance. Key works include Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (University of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1929/ 2 nd revised edition 1963]), his four key articles on the novel (anthologised in English as The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays** (University of Texas Press, 1981 [1934-41])), and Rabelais and His World (MIT Press, 1968 [1965]). Often overshadowed by Bakhtin, but of equal importance, are P.N. Medvedev’s masterly book-length Marxist critique of Russian formalism (which is also a social theory of literature in its own right), The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship** (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 [1928]), and V.N. Voloshinov’s Marxist theory of language: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language** (Harvard UP, 1986 [1929]). The latter was important to Raymond Williams’ later work (he discovered it by chance on a library shelf at Cambridge) and has informed Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s seminal A Marxist Philosophy of Language (Haymarket, 2004).

‘Western Marxism’ and Beyond

Eagleton dates his third category, ‘ideological criticism,’ to the period of ‘Western Marxism.’ The latter is a much-contested notion that became influential in the Anglophone world following the publication of Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (Verso, 1976), a study of intellectuals including György Lukács, Karl Korsch, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, Galvano Della Volpe, and Lucio Colletti. Anderson claims that, in contradistinction to previous generations of Marxists, Western Marxism is characterised by a period of political defeat (to fascism in the 1930s), a structural divorce of Marxist intellectuals from the masses, and – consequently – a written style that is often complex, obscure or antithetical to practical political action. Whether or not one endorses Anderson’s account, it is a useful periodising category.

If Lenin and Trotsky were concerned with literature primarily as an extension of immediate political struggles, critics of the mid-century were far closer to the preoccupations of the Bakhtin Circle, understanding literature as indirectly political – not least through the ideology of form . If Soviet socialist realism, the definitive study of which is Régine Robin’s Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic (Stanford UP, 1992 [1986]), was largely indifferent to form and style and fixated on ‘transparent’ heroic-proletarian content, critics such as Adorno and Lukács focused far more on literary form and the manner in which it crystallises ideologies. In many works, this attention to form is coextensive with a dialectical approach to criticism, partly inspired by the Hegelianised Marxism of Lukács and Korsch. Such an approach is characterised by an emphasis on reflexivity and totality: it stresses the way in which ‘the [critic’s] mind must deal with its own thought process just as much as with the material it works on’ (Fredric Jameson); it holds that literary works internalise social forms, situations and structures, yet simultaneously refuse them (thereby generating a critical negativity that resists vulgar economic or political reductionism); and it takes the mediated (not external or abstract) social totality as its ultimate critical purview. As Adorno put it in an introductory lecture on the dialectic in 1958:

on the one hand, we should not be content, as rigid specialists, to concentrate exclusively on the given individual phenomena but strive to understand these phenomena in the totality within which they function in the first place and receive their meaning; and, on the other hand, we should not hypostatize this totality, this whole, in which we stand, should not introduce the whole dogmatically from without, but always attempt to effect this transition from the individual phenomenon to the whole with constant reference to the matter itself.

The pinnacle of such dialectical criticism is to be found in the work of Adorno himself. See especially: Prisms (MIT Press, 1955) and Notes to Literature I & II** (Columbia UP, 1991 & 1992 [1958 & 1961]), which contain a range of extraordinary essays, as well as the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (Continuum, 1997 [1970]) – the definitive philosophical statement on art and the aesthetic in the immediate postwar period.

Adorno was profoundly influenced by Walter Benjamin, eleven years his senior. The pair first met in Vienna in 1923 and continued a lifelong friendship of lively intellectual debate (thoroughly analysed by Susan Buck-Morss in The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Free Press, 1977)). Benjamin’s profoundly original and essayistic work, which combines historical materialism with Jewish mysticism, ranges across a multitude of topics, with highlights including: a Kantian yet Kabbalist-influenced theory of cognition, Baroque drama and allegory, Baudelaire (a pivotal figure in Benjamin’s lifelong obsession with Paris as ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’), Kafka, Proust (whose mémoire involontaire he associates with surrealist shocks), Brecht (with whom he also shared a lifelong friendship), surrealism, language, and translation. In English, readers new to Benjamin might wish to consult the relevant essays in Illuminations** (Fontana, 1970) and Reflections (Schocken, 1978) as well as the theory of Baroque drama and allegory in The Origins of German Tragic Drama (Verso, 1998 [1928]). Those with a taste for completism may also wish to take on Benjamin’s enormous study of nineteenth-century Paris, consisting solely of fragments: The Arcades Project (Harvard UP, 2002 [1982]). Harvard University Press have published 4 volumes of Benjamin’s Selected Writings (2004-6).

Another towering figure of twentieth-century Marxist criticism is the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács. His 1923 work History and Class Consciousness (Merlin Press, 1971 [1923]) was hugely influential: it broke with the Second International emphasis on Marxism as a doctrine, stressing instead that Marxism is a dialectical method premised upon the category of totality, and made ‘reification’ a fundamental Marxist concept. Prior to his Marxist radicalisation, Lukács wrote two major works of literary criticism: the first, Soul and Form (Columbia UP, 2010 [1910]), is a (criminally) neglected set of passionate, tormented essays on the relation between art and life, the perfect abstractions of form versus the myriad imperfect minutiae of the human soul. These oppositions become connected to larger social contradictions between life and work, concrete and abstract, artistic fulfilment and bourgeois vocation; what Lukács is clearly seeking is a way of mediating or overcoming these oppositions, yet the tormented style is a sign that he has not yet located it. He continued these reflections in one of the truly great literary-critical works of the twentieth century: The Theory of the Novel** (MIT Press, 1971 [1920]). Contrasting the novel with the epic, Lukács argues that where the latter is the form that organically corresponds to an ‘integrated’ (i.e., non-alienated, non-reified) civilisation in which the social totality is immanently reconciled and sensually present, the novel is ‘the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.’ The second half of the book expounds a typology of the novel, concluding with a vaguely hopeful sign that Dostoevsky may offer a way out of the impasses of bourgeois modernity.

Through the experience of World War I and the Russian Revolution, Lukács ultimately arrived at the Marxist positions of History and Class Consciousness . Crucially, his later highly influential theory of realism should be read in the context of this book’s central essay on reification, since realism for Lukács is in many ways the narrative equivalent of the de-reified (and potentially dereifying) standpoint of the proletariat. In Studies in European Realism ** (Merlin Press, 1972) and Writer and Critic (Merlin Press, 1978) (see especially the essay ‘Narrate or Describe?’), Lukács argues that the great realists (Balzac, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann) penetrate beneath the epiphenomena of daily life to reveal the hidden objective laws at work which constitute society as such. In other works, however, this attachment to realism descends into anti-modernist literary-critical dogmatism (see, e.g., The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Merlin Press, 1963 [1958])). The other major critical work by Lukács is The Historical Novel ** (Penguin, 1969 [1937/1954]), a foundational study of the genre of the historical novel from its explosion in Walter Scott to its twentieth-century inheritors such as Heinrich Mann.

In France, the work of Sartre on committed literature is well-known. Situations I (Gallimard, 1947) collects his early texts on Faulkner, Dos Passos, Nabokov and others (recently translated as Critical Essays: Situations 1 (University of Chicago Press, 2017)). Notable here is the manner in which Sartre deduces an entire personal metaphysics from the styles and forms of these works, which he then judges against his own existentialist phenomenology of freedom and what Fredric Jameson has called his ‘linguistic optimism’ (for Sartre, everything is sayable – a position the French philosopher Alain Badiou would radicalise and mathematise). Styles like Faulkner’s, which implicitly deny this freedom, are held up for censure. The masterpiece of this period and approach is What Is Literature?** (Routledge Classics 2001, [1947]), which includes not only the well-known (and much criticised) passages on the supposed transparency of prose versus the potentially apolitical opaqueness of poetry, but also a rich and subtle history of French writers’ relations to their (virtual or actual) publics: a relation which, after the failed revolution of 1848, becomes one of denial. It concludes with a rallying cry for a ‘actual literature’ [ littérature en acte ] that would strive for a classless society in which ‘there is no difference of any kind between [a writer’s] subject and his public .’ Sartre’s work came under criticism in Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero (Hill & Wang, 2012 [1953]); for Barthes, commitment occurs not at the level of content but at that of ‘writing’ [ écriture ] (or form) – though one might contest the simplistic understanding of Sartre’s argument on which this is based. More recently, these problematics have been resurrected – and challenged – by Jacques Rancière in The Politics of Literature (Polity, 2010 [2007]), which argues that the politics of literature has nothing to do with the personal political proclivities of the author; rather, literature is political because as literature it ‘intervenes into this relationship between practices and forms of visibility and modes of saying that carves up one or more common worlds .’ Readers might also consult Sartre’s major studies of individual writers, including Baudelaire (Gallimard, 1946), Saint Genet (Gallimard, 1952), and – a three-tome magnum opus – L’Idiot de la Famille (Gallimard, 1971-2).

Lucien Goldmann, a Romanian-born French critic, developed an approach that became known as ‘genetic structuralism.’ He examined the structure of literary texts to discover the degree to which it embodied the ‘world vision’ of the class to which the writer belonged. For Goldmann literary works are the product, not of individuals, but of the ‘transindividual mental structures’ of specific social groups. These ‘mental structures’ or ‘world visions’ are themselves understood as ideological constructions produced by specific historical conjunctures. In his best-known work, The Hidden God (Verso, 2016 [1955]), he connects recurring categories in the plays of Racine (God, World, Man) to the religious movement known as Jansenism, which is itself understood as the world vision of the noblesse de robe , a class fraction who find themselves dependent upon the monarchy (the ‘robe’) but, since they are recruited from the bourgeoisie, politically opposed to it. The danger of Goldmann’s work is that the ‘homologies’ he draws between work, world vision and class, are premised upon a simplistic ‘expressive causality’.

Such expressive theories of causality were, famously, one of Louis Althusser’s philosophical and political targets. Proposing a theory of the social totality as decentred, consisting of multiple discontinuous practices and temporalities (in For Marx (Verso, 2005 [1965]) and Reading Capital (Verso, 2016 [1965])), Althusser’s fragmentary writings on art and literature unsurprisingly emphasise art’s discontinuous relation to ideology and the social totality. In his 1966 ‘Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre,’ Althusser argues that art is not simply an ideology like any other but neither is it a theoretical science: it makes us see ideology, makes it perceivable, thereby performing an ‘internal distanciation’ on ideology itself. Pierre Macherey developed this insight into an entire, extremely sophisticated theory of literary production in Towards a Theory of Literary Production** (Routledge, 2006 [1966]). For Macherey, ideology is both inscribed in and ‘redoubled’ or ‘made visible’ by literary texts just as much by what they do not say as by what they overtly proclaim: they are structured by eloquent silences . As Warren Montag has written of Macherey and Étienne Balibar’s work of this time: ‘these texts are intelligible, that is, become the objects of an adequate knowledge, only on the basis of contradictions that may be understood as their immanent cause.’ Alain Badiou published an important critique and further development of Macherey’s argument in ‘The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process’ (1966) (appears in Badiou’s The Age of Poets (Verso, 2014)), and Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology (New Left Books, 1976) – a major Althusserian intervention in the British literary critical scene – was strongly influenced by Macherey’s work. For Badiou’s later writings on literature, see Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford UP, 2004 [1998]), On Beckett (Clinamen Press, 2002), and The Age of the Poets (Verso, 2014); Jean-Jacques Lecercle has traced these developments in Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh UP, 2012). Macherey continued his own literary critical trajectory in À quoi pense la littérature? (PUF, 1990), Proust. Entre littérature et philosophie (Éditions Amsterdam, 2013), and Études de philosophie littéraire (De l’incidence éditeur, 2014).

British and US-American Marxist Literary Criticism: Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson

Raymond Williams was perhaps the most important British literary critic of the twentieth century. For a sense of his entire career, see the book-length interviews conducted by the editorial board of the New Left Review in Politics and Letters (Verso, 2015 [1979]). Of the vast range of his writings on literature, Marxism and Literature** (Oxford UP, 1977) is the most important from the perspective of literary criticism. It is the culmination of Williams’ increasing engagement, through the rise of the New Left from the mid-1950s, with the whole range of ‘Western Marxist’ texts discussed above, many of which were slowly being translated into English throughout the 1960s and 70s. Williams’ consistent manoeuvre in this book is to suggest the ways in which traditionally ‘Marxist’ theories of culture and literature remain residually idealist. Williams here formulates his mature positions on several of his key conceptual innovations: selective tradition, ‘dominant, residual and emergent’ (the three-fold temporality of the historical present), structure of feeling, and alignment. Yet the book must also be read in the context of the previous ground-breaking literary critical works that made it possible: The Long Revolution (Chatto & Windus, 1961), a theory of modernity as viewed from the perspective of the sociology of literature and artistic production; Modern Tragedy (Verso, 1979 [1966]), which combines a Marxist theory of tragedy with a powerful justification of revolution as our modern tragic horizon; Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (Penguin, 1973 [1952/ 1964]), a materialist theory of modern drama; The English Novel From Dickens to Lawrence (Chatto & Windus, 1970), a social history of the English novel (designed, in part, to challenge the hegemony of F. R. Leavis’ The Great Tradition (Chatto & Windus, 1948)); and – most importantly – The Country and the City ** (Oxford UP, 1973), a majestic literary and social history of urbanisation and the capitalist development of town and country relations. In his later work, Williams also wrote much to challenge prevailing idealist theories of modernism: see The Politics of Modernism (Verso, 1989).

Terry Eagleton was Williams’ student at Cambridge. Coming from a working-class Catholic background, Eagleton’s early writings were primarily concerned with Catholic theories of the body and language. A turning point came with the publication of Criticism and Ideology** (New Left Books, 1976), which signalled Eagleton’s conversion to Althusserianism and his intellectual break with Williams (it contains a now notorious chapter in which he accuses Williams of being a romantic, idealist, empiricist, populist!), though it had been preceded by the Goldmannian Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (Palgrave, 2005 [1975]). In the 1980s, Eagleton became increasingly interested in the revolutionary potential of criticism itself, partly by way of Walter Benjamin’s readings of Brecht (see Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism  (Verso, 1981)), and partly via feminism ( The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson  (Blackwell, 1982)). He has written a wide-ranging trilogy on Irish cultural history, but his most important mid-to-late works are arguably The Ideology of the Aesthetic ** (Blackwell, 1990), a detailed critical history of the entire aesthetic tradition, and Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic  (Blackwell, 2002), a major Marxist reconceptualisation of tragic theory and literature. An overview of his life and work can be found in the book-length interview The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (Verso, 2009).

Fredric Jameson, perhaps best-known for his theory of postmodernism ( Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham UP, 1991), was integral in the dissemination of ‘Western Marxist’ ideas in the Anglophone world. As mentioned at the outset, Marxism and Form** (Princeton UP, 1971) is a key introduction to many of these ideas. It includes detailed chapters on Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Lukács, and Sartre, as well as a major methodological essay on ‘dialectical criticism’. Jameson tested many of these ideas in a highly unusual work of ideological recuperation: Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (University of California Press, 1979). Perhaps Jameson’s most enduring work, however, is The Political Unconscious** (Cornell UP, 1981). Based on a modernised version of the medieval system of allegory, it develops a model of reading based on three levels: the text as symbolic act, the text as ‘ideologeme’ (‘the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes’) and the text as ‘ideology of form’. Its ultimate claim is that every literary text, via a system of (non-expressive) allegorical mediations, can be linked back to the non-transcendable horizon of History as class struggle. Jameson is also an important theorist of modernism, as witness his major work A Singular Modernity** (Verso, 2002) and the essay collection The Modernist Papers (Verso, 2007). His most important recent literary critical work is The Antinomies of Realism (Verso, 2013). Jameson also published a highly controversial article, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ ( Social Text , 1986), which alone has given rise to a vast secondary literature (the best-known critique of it being Aijaz Ahmad’s in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Verso, 1992)). Jameson is undoubtedly the most important cultural critic of the late twentieth century.

Contemporary Criticism

It is impossible to do justice to the range and richness of contemporary Marxist criticism, so I can only hope to indicate a few important works. Franco Moretti has been an influential figure in the field. His work on the Bildungsroman foregrounded the way in which the symbolic form of ‘youth’ mediated the contradictions of modernity and effected the transition from the heroic subjectivities of the Age of Revolution to the mundane and unheroic normality of everyday bourgeois life ( The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture** (Verso, 1987)). His study of the ‘modern epic,’ meanwhile, focused on such texts as Goethe’s Faust , Melville’s Moby Dick and Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude , arguing that they are ‘ world texts, whose geographical frame of reference is no longer the nation-state, but a broader entity – a continent, or the world-system as a whole’ ( The Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez (Verso, 1996)). In a move that would prove influential for materialist theories of ‘world literature’ (including his own), Moretti employs the categories of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis to suggest that such ‘world texts’ or ‘modern epics,’ whilst unknown to the relatively homogeneous states of the core are typical of the semi-periphery where combined development prevails. [2] Moretti has since extended this ‘geography of literary forms’ in ‘Conjectures on World Literature’** ( New Left Review , 2000). Taking its cue from Goethe and Marx’s remarks on Weltliteratur , and combining these with insights drawn from the Brazilian Marxist critic Roberto Schwarz, ‘Conjectures’ holds that world literature is ‘[o]ne, and unequal: one literature … or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal.’ Moretti’s most important work, though, is arguably his most recent publication: The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature** (Verso, 2013), a socio-literary study of the figure of the bourgeois, whose true ‘hero’ is the rise of literary prose.

The most significant of Moretti’s inheritors is the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), whose book Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool UP, 2015) aims to ‘resituate the problem of “world literature,” considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development.’ Fusing Fredric Jameson’s ‘singular modernity’ thesis with a Moretti-inflected world-systems analysis and Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development, the Warwick Research Collective defines world-literature as ‘ the literature of the world-system ’. World-literature (with a hyphen to show its fidelity to Wallersteinian world-systems analysis) is that literature which ‘registers’ in form and content the modern capitalist world-system. The book is also an intervention into debates on the definition of modernism. If ‘modernisation’ is understood as the ‘imposition’ of capitalist social relations on ‘cultures and societies hitherto un- or only sectorally capitalised’, and ‘modernity’ names ‘the way in which capitalist social relations are “lived”’, then ‘modernism’ is that literature which ‘encodes’ the lived experience of the ‘capitalisation of the world’ produced by modernisation.

            Individual members of the Warwick Research Collective have also made important contributions to what might (problematically) be termed ‘Marxist postcolonial theory’. Benita Parry’s Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (Routledge, 2004) brings together a series of sophisticated essays which, whilst recognising the significance of much work done under the emblem of postcolonial studies, suggest that the material impulses of colonialism – its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression – have been omitted from mainstream postcolonial work (by Subaltern Studies, Edward Saïd, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakracorty Spivak). Neil Lazarus’ The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge UP, 2011) not only extends this critique but attempts to reconstruct the entire field of postcolonial studies by developing new Marxist concepts attentive to the insights of postcolonial theory. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee has likewise charted new terrain for Marxist postcolonial studies, but has done so with increased sensitivity to ecology (see Postcolonial Environments Nature: Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (Palgrave, 2010)). This approach has been strengthened by Sharae Deckard’s ambitious research project on ‘world-ecological literature’ (for a programmatic summary, see her forthcoming ‘Mapping Planetary Nature: Conjectures on World-Ecological Fiction’).

            In other recent work:

• Alex Woloch has developed a theory of minor characters and protagonists in the realist novel that connects the ‘asymmetric structure of characterization – in which many are represented but attention flows to a delimited center’ to the ‘competing pull of inequality and democracy within the nineteenth-century bourgeois imagination’ ( The One vs. the Many , Princeton UP, 2003).
• Anna Kornbluh has offered a nuanced materialist account of realism’s formal mediations and ‘realisations’ of finance in Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham University Press, 2014).
• Joshua Clover has argued that the period from the 1970s to the economic crisis of 2007-8 should be understood as the (Braudelian) ‘Autumn of the system.’ His fundamental thesis is ‘that an organizing trope of Autumnal literature is the conversion of the temporal to the spatial ’. It is this conversion that non -narrative forms such as poetry are better able to grasp and figure forth’ (‘Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital.’ JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory , 2011).
• In The Matter of Capital (Harvard UP, 2011) Christopher Nealon emphasises the ubiquity and variety of thematic, formal and intertextual poetic reflections upon capitalism across poetry of the ‘American century.’ He shows that poets as diverse as Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Jack Spicer, the Language poets, Claudia Rankine and Kevin Davies ‘have at the center of their literary projects an attempt to understand the relationship between poetry and capitalism, most often worked out as an attempt to understand the relationship of texts to historical crisis’.
• Ruth Jennison’s The Zukofsky Era (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), argues that ‘the Objectivists of the Zukofsky Era inherit the first [modernist] generation’s experimentalist break with prior systems of representation, and … strive to adequate this break to a futurally pointed content of revolutionary politics.’
• Sarah Brouillette has published a range of important work on the history of the book market and creative industries. See especially, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford UP, 2014).
• My own book, The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (Brill/ Haymarket, 2017), develops a materialist theory of style through an immanent critique of the work of Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson.

[1] Sometimes rendered in English as ‘Georg Lukács’.

[2] For explanations of these complex terms (world-systems analysis, core, semi-periphery), see Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Duke UP, 2004).

Image derived from  “Marxism”  by  rdesign812  is licensed under  CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

Historical Materialism is a Marxist journal, appearing four times a year, based in London. Founded in 1997 it asserts that, not withstanding the variety of its practical and theoretical articulations, Marxism constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analysing social phenomena, with an eye to their overhaul. In our selection of material we do not favour any one tendency, tradition or variant. Marx demanded the ‘Merciless criticism of everything that exists’: for us that includes Marxism itself.

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Marxist Criticism

Mar-ks-hist Kri-tuh-siz-uhm

Marxist criticism is based on the theory of Marxism, which stands against the capitalistic model of society and class discrimination.

E.g. Marxist literary criticism is an approach to reading, writing, and studying literature, while Marxism is a theory of history and social change based on class struggle.

Related terms: Literary criticism , Socialist Criticism, Marxist Theory of Literature, Proletarian Literature, Cultural Hegemony, Ideology, Materialist Interpretation, Class Analysis

Marxist criticism in arts, or particularly Marxist literary criticism, is based on the materialist philosophy of Marxism rooted in the works of German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles.

Explore Marxist criticism

• 1 What is Marxist Criticism?
• 2 Marxist Model of Society
• 3 Key Marxist Terms and Concepts
• 4 Key Methods of Marxist Literary Criticism
• 6 Suggested Readings

What is Marxist Criticism?

Marxist view of history, economics, politics, culture, and social conflict is grounded in class struggle. Marx and Engels developed their economic and cultural theories amidst the peaking industrial capitalist society of 19th-century Europe, specifically Britain.

Marx and Engles addressed a broader interplay between ideas, society, and historical development. While Marx’s works focused on economic aspects, Engels reflected on the role of ideas and culture, especially in his letters to Marx and others. He traced the dialectical relationship between economic conditions and ideas in his book ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’ (1888). Like Marx, he revered great art and did not assign economic circumstances as its sole determinants.

However, in the 20th century, some forms of Marxism became rigid and dogmatic, rejecting any autonomy to art (see FAQs). Simultaneously, some critics known to be practicing Englesian Marxist criticism adopted a flexible approach to analyzing art and literature, reflecting on how it both reinforces and challenges the dominant status quo. The Engelsian critics became more acceptable as they sought to understand the intricate relationship between artistic expression, social context , and historical dynamics from a Marxist perspective .

Marxist Model of Society

The fundamental Marxist view is that the working of society, its social groupings, dominant ideas, and political institutions are determined by its “material production,” i.e., the organization of economic resources like production and distribution of material goods.

Thus, in a Marxist explanation, society is formed by two constituents superstructure, i.e., culture, art, or the world of ideas, and its base, i.e., the material world or resources of production, distribution, and trade; the base or economic base determines the superstructure or other aspects of society like culture and art.

Key Marxist Terms and Concepts

The following are the crucial Marxist terms and concepts:

Proletariat

The Proletariat is the working class in the Marxist theory, which is the subservient and exploited class. Marx and Engles used the term proletariat to define the powerless class in a modern capitalist society, which does not own the means of production and thus must sell their labor to the bourgeoisie to generate income and sustain themselves. Marxism anticipates a proletarian revolution wherein workers will unite to overthrow capitalism, establishing a classless society.

Bourgeoisie

The bourgeoisie is the ruling class in Marxist theory, which reinforces its power by exploiting the proletariat and appropriating the value of their labor. Marx and Engles used the term bourgeoisie to define the dominant class in the modern capitalist system, which owns the means of production and distribution. The bourgeoisie gained prominence during the 18th and 19th centuries with the rise of capitalism, as they owned capital and controlled trade and production, wielding economic and political power.

Ideology is an essential concept for all Marxist critics.   It is the set of dominant ideas and values in any era that perpetuate and legitimize the supremacy of the ruling class; such values or beliefs are usually covert and may go unrecognized, but they percolate all the culture and art of the given era. French Marxist theoretician Louis Althusser defined ‘Ideology’ as “a system (possessing its logic and proper rigor) of representations (images, myths , ideas or concepts according to the case) endowed with an existence and a historical role at the heart of a given society.”

Interpellation

Introduced by French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in Marxist theory, interpellation is the process through which class dominance is maintained and reinforced not by physical force but through the ideological modulation of individuals. Individuals are tricked into thinking they are free agents in making choices, but the available options constantly perpetuate the ruling class’s dominance, making people internalize the social organization. Institutions like education and media are often used to interpellate individuals while seemingly offering a wide array of choices. 

Repressive Structures

Introduced by Louis Althusser in Marxist theory, the term repressive structures refers to the direct physical force or overt political control exerted by the dominant class, primarily through state institutions like prison, army, police, courts, etc. To suppress dissent or revolutionary tendencies and reinforce the existing social structure, the ruling class uses direct coercion through repressive structures to overpower the proletariat. Antonio Gramsci used the term “rule” for such repressive structures in his ‘Prison Notebooks’ (1929-1935).

Introduced by Antonio Gramsci in Marxist theory during the 1930s, hegemony contrasted with “repressive structures” or “rule” refers to the covert power exerted by the state or the dominant classes through subtle manipulation of values, ideas, and culture. It subverts the revolutionary consciousness while shaping people’s consciousness in a way that makes the dominant class’s worldview seem ‘natural’ like it is just ‘the way things are.’ Louis Althusser’s ideas of “ideological structures” and “state ideological apparatuses” are similar to Gramsci’s notion of hegemony.

Economic Determinism 

Economic determinism refers to the traditional Marxist theory wherein the economic structure of the society determines and shapes everything from political institutions and class relations to culture, history, and art. Traditional Marxism has often been criticized for such an oversimplified explanation of the development and history of societies, which ignores the complexities of various other factors that impact the changes in human society.

Overdeterminism

Introduced by Althusser in Marxist theory during the 1960s, the idea of overdeterminism undercuts the simplified explanation of economic determinism, arguing that society and history are determined or shaped by multiple interconnected factors, including economic, political, cultural, psychological, etc. Borrowing the concept of overdeterminism from psychoanalysis, Althusser provided a broader Marxist understanding of society, overcoming its limitation of a simplistic explanation of societal development.

Relative autonomy

The concept of relative autonomy in Marxism is the view that acknowledges a certain degree of independence of art and culture from the economic structure of the society. It does not disregard the connection between art and economics or, in Marxist terms, between the cultural superstructure and economic base, respectively; instead, the concept attributes partial independence or relative autonomy to art, including literature, thus crediting it a role in change, complexity, and resistance within capitalist society.

Key Methods of Marxist Literary Criticism

Marxist critique of literature includes the following crucial methods:

• Marxist criticism considers the authors and their work significantly influenced by socio-economic circumstances. Thus, it is assumed that the context of a work is related to the social class of the author. However, the authors might be unaware of any such class or its ideological impact, which, according to Marxist perspective, is always present in the text overtly or covertly.
• Marxist literary critics, like psychoanalytic critics, often find the covert or hidden themes or motifs in a work of literature that are related to primary Marxist concerns, such as class struggles or conflict of interests, the impact of socio-economic forces, and the progression of society due to manifested class conflicts .
• Marxist critics also relate the formation of a literary genre or movement to the socio-economic circumstances of the time in which it emerged. For instance, Marxists often consider novels as a product of the middle class; the growth of the novel is related to the expansion of the middle class during the 19th century as industrialism was at its peak.
• Another Marxist point of view includes situating the literary form within the socio-economic and, specifically, political context of the times in which it was dominant. For instance, for some Marxist critics, formal forms such as sonnets (dominant during the Elizabethan era ) and the use of strict metrical patterns convey discipline, order, and stability; for some, realism bears and conveys a validation of the bourgeoisie social structure, and for others, ballads rooted in oral traditions with fluid patterns, refrains , and simplicity reflect working-class culture.

Vulgar Marxism, which emerged during the 1930s in Soviet Russia, was an orthodox approach to Marxist theory that followed a crude form of economic determinism, disregarding the role of any other factors that could contribute to societal change or development. Thus, art or literature was also reduced to an effect of economic circumstances, and authors were considered mere viewpoints of their respective social classes. The approach is criticized within Marxism; Gramsci’s and later Althusser’s ideas, like hegemony, overdeterminism, and relative autonomy, target such reductionist, limiting, and simplistic approaches toward Marxist criticism.

Frankfurt School, founded in 1923 as a political research institute under the University of Frankfurt, Germany, is a social theory and criticism school. During the 20th century, significant thinkers of the school, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer, expanded simplistic traditional Marxism and challenged Soviet propaganda by taking an interdisciplinary approach emphasizing the role of hegemony aiming to understand various forces and complex relationships between culture, politics, and economics.

When modernist writers were banned in Soviet Russia during the 1930s as propagandist literature and straight social realism were advocated to present the ruling communist party’s views methodologically, the Frankfurt School approved modernist literature, which, according to them, through disruption and experimentation, exposed the ideological workings and unconscious processes of capitalist society that perpetuate oppression and resist resistance. Literary Marxist Bertolt Brecht presented innovative modernist but Marxist theatre.

Challenging orthodox Marxism while expanding the limits of traditional Marxism, Revisionist Marxism reinterprets the Marxist theory, offering pragmatic and flexible concepts amidst the dynamic capitalist society. It emerged in the 20th century against the rigid views advanced in Soviet Russia. Revisionist Marxism expands beyond economic determinism and offers complex ways of how society works while sticking with Marxism and keeping it relevant in changing times. Louis Althusser is the most recent theoretician who provided a rich theoretical base for flexible but strictly Marxist revisionist thinking.

Recent prominent Marxist critics include Louis Althusser (French), Raymond Williams (Welsh), Terry Eagleton (British), Fredric Jameson (American), Franco Moretti (Italian), Slavoj Žižek (Slovenian), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Indian), Judith Butler (American), Catherine Belsey (British), David Harvey (British), Aijaz Ahmad (Indian), and Nancy Fraser (American).

Suggested Readings

If you are interested in reading more about Marxist criticism, you can read from the sources mentioned below:

• Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels.  The Communist Manifesto . Translated by Samuel Moore, Penguin Books, 2004.
• Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Translated by Ben Brewster, Verso (New Left Books), 2014, pp. 232-272.
• Walter, Benjamin. “ The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Version] .” Translated by Michael W. Jennings,  Grey Room , no. 39, 2010, pp. 11–38.
• Eagleton, Terry. “Capitalism, modernism , and postmodernism .”  New Left Review , no. 152, July/Aug 1985.
• Jameson, Fredric. “ The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate .”  New German Critique , no. 33, 1984, pp. 53–65.  JSTOR.

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31 What Is Marxist, Postcolonial, and Ethnic Studies Criticism?

Marxist criticism is a critical approach to literature that views texts through the lens of economic and social class structures and the relationships of power and oppression that exist within these structures. This type of criticism is based on the ideas of Karl Marx , a 19th-century German philosopher and economist, who argued that social class is the primary determinant of human history and culture. Marxist critics examine the ways in which literature reflects and reinforces the dominant ideology and power structures of a society, as well as the ways in which texts can challenge and subvert these ideologies. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton explains it this way: “Marxist criticism is not merely a ‘sociology of literature’, concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. Its aim is to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and, meanings. But it also means grasping those forms styles and meanings as the product of a particular history” (Eagleton 3). One of the key principles of Marxist criticism is the idea that literature is not a neutral or objective reflection of reality, but is instead shaped by the interests and values of those who produce and consume it. When we do Marxist criticism, we are concerned with class struggles and the means of production.

Postcolonial criticism is a theoretical and analytical framework that emerged in the 1980s as a response to the legacy of European colonialism and imperialism from the 18th-20th centuries. It seeks to examine how the experiences of colonized peoples are represented in literature and other cultural forms, and how these representations reflect and perpetuate colonial power relations. With this lens, we explore how colonialism impacts language, identity, and culture, and how these impacts are reflected in literary texts. The term “post” does not imply that colonialism has ended; it refers to the effects on Indigneous people after colonialism. One of the key principles of postcolonial criticism is the importance of examining the intersectionality of colonialism with other forms of identity and oppression, such as race, gender, sexuality, and class. It also emphasizes the importance of centering the perspectives and experiences of colonized peoples in literary analysis, and in understanding how their experiences are shaped by systemic colonialism and imperialism. Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism,   which considers how the West has used this term to denigrate the East, is widely credited with introducing this critical approach.

Ethnic studies is a broad term that encompasses a variety of critical approaches to literature, all focusing on a particular ethnic group that is marginalized or subordinate to a dominant culture. For example, African American studies focuses on literature written by and for African Americans. Chicano/a studies explores literature produced by people of Mexican ancestry who live in the United States. Indigenous studies looks at literature from the perspective of native peoples in counties that have been colonized. For authors who are based in the United States, scholars use an ethnic studies rather than a postcolonial approach, even though both postcolonialism and ethnic studies are concerned with the imbalance of power between colonizers and Indigenous or marginalized peoples. All three types of criticism can be intersectional; in other words, it’s entirely appropriate to consider both socioeconomic class and race (or gender, which we will study later in this book) in your critical analysis.

Learning Objectives

• Recognize how different approaches determine possible outcomes in interpretation (CLO 1.3)
• Deliberate on what approach best suits particular texts and purposes (CLO 1.4)
• Understand how formal elements in literary texts create meaning within the context of culture and literary discourse. (CLO 2.1)
• Be exposed to a variety of critical strategies through literary theory lenses, such as formalism/New Criticism, reader-response, structuralism, deconstruction, historical and cultural approaches (New Historicism, postcolonial, Marxism), psychological approaches, feminism, and queer theory (CLO 4.1)
• Demonstrate through discussion and/or writing exposure to critical strategies that deal with cultural, historical, thematic, and theoretical contexts (CLO 6.1)
• Understand that interpretation is inherently political, and that it reveals assumptions and expectations about value, truth, and the human experience (CLO 7.1)
• Demonstrate awareness of the political stance one takes interpreting literature (CLO 7.2)
• Discuss the significance and impact of multiple perspectives on a given text (CLO 7.3)

Excerpts from Scholarship

Marxist: from “bourgeois and proletarians” in the communist manifesto by karl marx and friedrich engels.

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. 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. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop. Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages. We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Postcolonial:  Excerpt from “The Profits of Postcolonialism” by Dorothy Figueira

Postcolonial criticism, like most poststructural theory, relies in great measure on the notion that some heritage of systems limits the reader. Our present condition, although seemingly benign, imposes an existential limit, and theory alone can liberate us from systemic constraints (Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism” 216). Curiously missing from the discussion is any serious questioning of how the text’s appearance as a network of hegemonic or subversive gestures suits the state of literary theoretical professionalization. Theory thus allows individuals cut off from any effective social action and buoyed by their security as academic professionals to claim solidarity with the disenfranchised. This alienation from real powerlessness (the academic Marxist’s guilt vis-a-vis the worker) can then be compensated for by a posture of powerlessness vis-a-vis representation. But even this strategy sometimes fails. The critic must then self-fashion him/herself through imaginary marginalization or, as the German Americanist Winfried Fluck has termed it, “expressive individualism” (Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism” 228), resulting in the wide-ranging identification of a privileged class of academics with the marginalized other. The historically oppressed become the new role models for the critic, giving political authority to the search for cultural difference (Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism” 228). In this way, theory and professionalism interact and justify each other (Fluck, “Americanization” 18). The lack of an effective historical consciousness explains the curious phenomenon that the study of postcoloniality has primarily found urgent currency in the First World, whereas few ripples resonate in the excolonized worlds of South Asia and Africa. The predominance of critical contestants in Euro-American centers reflects how much most theory is inherently Eurocentric and culture bound (Clark 24). Thus, some critics have been led to ask what agendas lurk behind the academic formation called postcoloniality and its complicity with certain forms of Eurocentric cultural theory (Radhakrishnan 750). What power struggles are being replicated within this critical discourse? Does it represent nothing but a production of a comprador intelligentsia (Appiah 348)? Nor has the posturing or positioning of postcolonial critics gone unquestioned. Benita Parry has accused them of exorbitation of their roles and the suppression of native voices (172). Arif Dirlik (343) and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (598) cite the postcolonial theorists’ disengagements from significant issues of neocolonialism and retreats into a ratified form of postmodern abstraction. Dirlik even sees postcolonialism’s emergence as a form of global capitalism where critics, commanding high salaries in the First World, presume to be existentially connected to continuing problems of Third-World social, political and cultural domination. As a result, postcolonial critics’ refusal to define postcolonial theory in an unambiguous manner might not necessarily point to diversity or vitality, but rather to personal projects and games of identification. Any adequate analysis of the literature of postcolonial criticism cannot avoid highlighting the extent to which the intellectual rigor and development of this criticism are seriously circumscribed by ideological posturing, reifying critical jargon, and strategies of self-representation. It might well be that postcolonial criticism never intended to address directly the myriad problems of analyzing Third-World societies, but rather has been fascinated with theorizing structures of power and, by extension, the critic’s position vis-a-vis these structures. This subtext informs a work such as Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies (1997), where the German imaginaire is the focus of discussion rather than any historical colonial reality. A German fictional literature on colonialism is then telescoped to show the ways in which fantasies of power can function even in a vacuum. The Holocaust becomes the inevitable case where such fantasies are unleashed upon reality. Here, the logic of postcoloniality reaches its natural conclusion, where a text is only a text and refers to no historical action. No coloniality, no postcoloniality, just ruminations on fantasies of power. Postcolonial studies of this genre strike the old-fashioned pose of the European psychoanalyst who unmasks the cultural crime of deformation. They are based on the virtually self-explanatory phenomenon of cultural struggle and adjustment. Since the postcolonial subject/critic is someone with access to positional knowledge, the work of generations of nonpostcolonial scholars (Orientalists or others who fit only marginally into the construction of Orientalism) is not particularly important. Even those who made a genuine effort to bring cultures formerly called “Oriental” into the Euro-American continuum need not be examined. The postcolonial critic can dismiss this work as serving a decrepit ideology (Clark 23). Often the postcolonial critic is unaware that a body of scholarship written by area specialists pertaining to the topic even exists. In a quasimessianic manner, the postcolonial critic positions her/himself to speak for the Other. Since Spivak’s subalterns theoretically are mute, she can effectively coopt their voice. In the process, she creates a need for the theorist (Spivak herself) who will determine the discourse of the victimized. This is, indeed, a slippery game. For the postcolonial critic, notions of voicelessness and absence serve to license the neglect of any texts (“archives,” “voices,” and “spaces”) that contradict the theoretical script.

African American Studies: Excerpt from “ Controversial Blackness: The Historical Development & Future Trajectory of African American Studies” by Martha Biondi

The black studies movement has been marked by intense debates over its academic character. During and after the years of its emergence, black studies was criticized, internally and externally, on two interrelated grounds: that it lacked curricular coherence and that, by not having a single methodology, it failed to meet the definition of a discipline. As a result, many educators in the early black studies movement pursued a two-pronged quest for a standardized curriculum, on the one hand, and an original, authoritative methodology on the other. At the same time, many scholars in the black studies movement questioned whether either of these pursuits was desirable or even attainable. In other words, while some scholars have insisted that African American studies must devise its own unique research methodology, others contend that as a multidiscipline, or interdisciplinary discipline, its strength lies in incorporating multiple, diverse methodologies. In a similar vein, while some have argued for a standardized curriculum, others argue that higher education is better served by dynamism and innovation. I argue that the discipline’s ultimate acceptance in academe (to the extent that it has gained acceptance) has come from the production of influential scholarship and research and the development of new conceptual approaches that have influenced other disciplines. Pioneering scholarship and influential intellectual innovations, rather than standardized pedagogy or methodology, have been the route to influence in American intellectual life. A tension between authority and freedom animates these debates. As late as 2000, an article in The Chronicle of Higher Historical Education reinforced the idea that multiple perspectives and methodologies had retarded the trajectory of African American studies- The author of an essay on the state of the field criticized the diverse character of African American studies courses at different universities: “The Ohio State class is chronological with a literary bent,” she wrote. “Duke’s take: cultural studies. The Penn course filters everything through a W.E.B. Du Bois lens, and N.Y.U. combines pan-Africanism with urban studies.” Of course, this sampling reflects the range one would find in the departments of history, sociology, or English at these same universities. But the author stresses disarray. “There’s a reason 30 years after the discipline developed that people still wonder whether the black-studies curriculum represents a coherent subject or a smorgasbord,” she concludes. In this view, the discipline’s strengths—”eclectic, expansive, experimental curricula” —are also its weaknesses…. Scholars and teachers influenced by Afrocentricity have been among the most consistent advocates of the need to create a distinctive methodology. For Temple University scholar Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity “is the only way you can approach African American Studies” because it puts ancient African knowledge systems at the center of analysis. For Greg Carr of Howard University, the challenge is to draw on “deep Africana thought,” the traditions of” classical and medieval Africa,” for guidance in enacting positive social change for African descendants. A key mission of African American studies, he believes, should be to reconnect “narratives of African identity to the contemporary era.” His department taps “into the long genealogy of Africana experiences” in order to assess how to improve the world. Carr distinguishes this mission from the mission of African American studies on other campuses. “We’re not trying to explain blackness for white people” or looking at “our contributions to American society.” Rather, the approach at Howard is “an extension of the long arc of Africana intellectual work.” The inclination to look for insights in the precolonial African past, rejecting European modernity and thereby hoping to escape or resolve the legacies of colonialism and enslavement, is fundamental to the approach that leading architects of Afrocentricity have taken.

Looking for Power Relationships in Texts

The short story “A Cup of Tea” by the New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield, who was an important author in the modernist movement, provides opportunities for us to consider a text through its power dynamics. Mansfield was from a socially prominent and well-off family. When she was in her twenties, she had a romantic relationship with a Māori woman, Maata Mahupuku. The short story below is set in London, where Mansfield went to college and lived for many years before her death from tuberculosis at the age of 34.

A Cup of Tea (1921)

BY KATHERINE MANSFIELD

ROSEMARY FELL was not exactly beautiful. No, you couldn’t have called her beautiful. Pretty ? Well, if you took her to pieces … But why be so cruel as to take anyone to pieces ? She was young, brilliant, extremely modern, exquisitely well dressed, amazingly well read in the newest of the new books, and her parties were the most delicious mixture of the really important people and… artists—quaint creatures, discoveries of hers, some of them too terrifying for words, but others quite presentable and amusing.

Rosemary had been married two years. She had a duck of a boy. No, not Peter—Michael. And her husband absolutely adored her. They were rich, really rich, not just comfortably well off, which is odious and stuffy and sounds like one’s grandparents. But if Rosemary wanted to shop she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street. If she wanted to buy flowers, the car pulled up at that perfect shop in Regent Street, and Rosemary inside the shop  just gazed in her dazzled, rather exotic way, and said: ” I want those and those and those. Give me four bunches of those. And that jar of roses. Yes, I’ll have all the roses in the jar. No, no lilac. I hate lilac. It’s got no shape.” The attendant bowed and put the lilac out of sight, as though this was only too true; lilac was dreadfully shapeless. ” Give me those stumpy little tulips. Those red and white ones.” And she was followed to the car by a thin shopgirl staggering under an immense white paper armful that looked like a baby in long clothes…

One winter afternoon she had been buying something in a little antique shop in Curzon Street. It was a shop she liked. For one thing, one usually had it to oneself. And then the man who kept it was ridiculously fond of serving her. He beamed whenever she came in. He clasped his hands ; he was so gratified he could scarcely speak. Flattery, of course. All the same, there was something…

” You see, madam,” he would explain in his low respectful tones, ” I love my things. I would rather not part with them than sell them to someone who does not appreciate them, who has not that fine feeling which is so rare…” And, breathing deeply he unrolled a tiny square of blue velvet and pressed it on the glass counter with his pale finger-tips.

To-day it was a little box. He had been keeping it for her. He had shown it to nobody  as yet. An exquisite little enamel box with a glaze so fine it looked as though it had been baked in cream. On the lid a minute creature stood under a flowery tree, and a more minute creature still had her arms round his neck. Her hat, really no bigger than a geranium petal, hung from a branch ; it had green ribbons. And there was a pink cloud like a watchful cherub floating above their heads. Rosemary took her hands out of her long gloves. She always took off her gloves to examine such things. Yes, she liked it very much. She loved it; it was a great duck. She must have it. And, turning the creamy box, opening and shutting it, she couldn’t help noticing how charming her hands were against the blue velvet. The shopman, in some dim cavern of his mind, may have dared to think so too. For he took a pencil, leant over the counter, and his pale bloodless fingers crept timidly towards those rosy, flashing ones, as he murmured gently : ” If I may venture to point out to madam, the flowers on the little lady’s bodice.”

” Charming! ” Rosemary admired the flowers. But what was the price ? For a moment the shopman did not seem to hear. Then a murmur reached her. ” Twenty-eight guineas, madam.”

” Twenty-eight guineas.” Rosemary gave no sign. She laid the little box down ; she buttoned her gloves again. Twenty-eight  guineas. Even if one is rich… She looked vague. She stared at a plump tea-kettle like a plump hen above the shopman’s head, and her voice was dreamy as she answered: ” Well, keep it for me—will you ? I’ll…”

But the shopman had already bowed as though keeping it for her was all any human being could ask. He would be willing, of course, to keep it for her for ever.

The discreet door shut with a click. She was outside on the step, gazing at the winter afternoon. Rain was falling, and with the rain it seemed the dark came too, spinning down like ashes. There was a cold bitter taste in the air, and the new-lighted lamps looked sad. Sad were the lights in the houses opposite. Dimly they burned as if regretting something. And people hurried by, hidden under their hateful umbrellas. Rosemary felt a strange pang. She pressed her muff against her breast; she wished she had the little box, too, to cling to. Of course, the car was there. She’d only to cross the pavement. But still she waited. There are moments, horrible moments in life, when one emerges from shelter and looks out, and it’s awful. One oughtn’t to give way to them. One ought to go home and have an extra-special tea. But at the very instant of thinking that, a young girl, thin, dark, shadowy—where had she come from ?—was standing at Rosemary’s elbow and a voice like a sigh, almost like a sob,  breathed : ” Madam, may I speak to you a moment ? ”

“Speak to me ? ” Rosemary turned. She saw a little battered creature with enormous eyes, someone quite young, no older than herself, who clutched at her coat-collar with reddened hands, and shivered as though she had just come out of the water.

“M-madam,” stammered the voice. ” Would you let me have the price of a cup of tea ? ”

“A cup of tea ?” There was something simple, sincere in that voice ; it wasn’t in the least the voice of a beggar. ” Then have you no money at all?” asked Rosemary.

“None, madam,” came the answer.

“How extraordinary!” Rosemary peered through the dusk, and the girl gazed back at her. How more than extraordinary! And suddenly it seemed to Rosemary such an adventure. It was like something out of a novel by Dostoevsky, this meeting in the dusk. Supposing she took the girl home ? Supposing she did do one of those things she was always reading about or seeing on the stage, what would happen ? It would be thrilling. And she heard herself saying afterwards to the amazement of her friends : ” I simply took her home with me,” as she stepped forward and said to that dim person beside her : ” Come home to tea with me.”

The girl drew back startled. She even  stopped shivering for a moment. Rosemary put out a hand and touched her arm. ” I mean it,” she said, smiling. And she felt how-simple and kind her smile was. ” Why won’t you ? Do. Come home with me now in my car and have tea.”

“You—you don’t mean it, madam,” said the girl, and there was pain in her voice.

“But I do,” cried Rosemary. ” I want you to. To please me. Come along.”

The girl put her fingers to her lips and her eyes devoured Rosemary. ” You’re—you’re not taking me to the police station ? ” she stammered.

“The police station ! ” Rosemary laughed out. ” Why should I be so cruel ? No, I only want to make you warm and to hear— anything you care to tell me.”

Hungry people are easily led. The footman held the door of the car open, and a moment later they were skimming through the dusk.

“There!” said Rosemary. She had a feeling of triumph as she slipped her hand through the velvet strap. She could have said, ” Now I’ve got you,” as she gazed at the little captive she had netted. But of course she meant it kindly. Oh, more than kindly. She was going to prove to this girl that—wonderful things did happen in life, that—fairy godmothers were real, that— rich people had hearts, and that women were  sisters. She turned impulsively, saying: ” Don’t  be frightened. After all, why shouldn’t you come back with me ? We’re both women. If I’m the more fortunate, you ought to expect…”

But happily at that moment, for she didn’t know how the sentence was going to end, the car stopped. The bell was rung, the door opened, and with a charming, protecting, almost embracing movement, Rosemary drew the other into the hall. Warmth, softness, light, a sweet scent, all those things so familiar to her she never even thought about them, she watched that other receive. It was fascinating. She was like the rich little girl in her nursery with all the cupboards to open, all the boxes to unpack.

“Come, come upstairs,” said Rosemary, longing to begin to be generous. ” Come up to my room.” And, besides, she wanted to spare this poor little thing from being stared at by the servants; she decided as they mounted the stairs she would not even ring for Jeanne, but take off her things by herself. The great thing was to be natural!

And “There ! ” cried Rosemary again, as they reached her beautiful big bedroom with the curtains drawn, the fire leaping on her wonderful lacquer furniture, her gold cushions and the primrose and blue rugs.

The girl stood just inside the door ; she seemed dazed. But Rosemary didn’t mind that.

“Come and sit down,” she cried, dragging her big chair up to the fire, ” in this comfy chair. Come and get warm. You look so dreadfully cold.”

“I daren’t, madam,” said the girl, and she edged backwards.

“Oh, please,”—Rosemary ran forward—” you mustn’t be frightened, you mustn’t, really. Sit down, and when I’ve taken off my things we shall go into the next room and have tea and be cosy. Why are you afraid ? ” And gently she half pushed the thin figure into its deep cradle.

But there was no answer. The girl stayed just as she had been put, with her hands by her sides and her mouth slightly open. To be quite sincere, she looked rather stupid. But Rosemary wouldn’t acknowledge it. She leant over her, saying : ” Won’t you take off your hat ? Your pretty hair is all wet. And one is so much more comfortable without a hat, isn’t one ? ”

There was a whisper that sounded like ” Very good, madam,” and the crushed hat was taken off.

“And let me help you off with your coat, too,” said Rosemary.

The girl stood up. But she held on to the chair with one hand and let Rosemary pull. It was quite an effort. The other scarcely helped her at all. She seemed to stagger like a child, and the thought came and went through Rosemary’s mind, that if people wanted helping they must respond a little, just a little, other-wise it became very difficult indeed. And what was she to do with the coat now ? She left it on the floor, and the hat too. She was just going to take a cigarette off the mantelpiece when the girl said quickly, but so lightly and strangely : ” I’m very sorry, madam, but I’m going to faint. I shall go off, madam, if I don’t have something.”

“Good heavens, how thoughtless I am ! ” Rosemary rushed to the bell.

“Tea ! Tea at once ! And some brandy immediately ! ”

The maid was gone again, but the girl almost cried out. ” No, I don’t want no brandy. I never drink brandy. It’s a cup of tea I want, madam.” And she burst into tears.

It was a terrible and fascinating moment. Rosemary knelt beside her chair.

“Don’t cry, poor little thing,” she said. ” Don’t cry.” And she gave the other her lace handkerchief. She really was touched beyond words. She put her arm round those thin, bird-like shoulders.

Now at last the other forgot to be shy, forgot everything except that they were both women, and gasped out: ” I can’t go on no longer like this. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it. I shall do away with myself. I can’t bear no more.”

“You shan’t have to. I’ll look after you. Don’t cry any more. Don’t you see what a good thing it was that you met me ? We’ll have tea and you’ll tell me everything. And I shall arrange something. I promise.  Do  stop crying. It’s so exhausting. Please ! ”

The other did stop just in time for Rosemary to get up before the tea came. She had the table placed between them. She plied the poor little creature with everything, all the sandwiches, all the bread and butter, and every time her cup was empty she filled it with tea, cream and sugar. People always said sugar was so nourishing. As for herself she didn’t eat; she smoked and looked away tactfully so that the other should not be shy.

And really the effect of that slight meal was marvellous. When the tea-table was carried away a new being, a light, frail creature with tangled hair, dark lips, deep, lighted eyes, lay back in the big chair in a kind of sweet languor, looking at the blaze. Rosemary lit a fresh cigarette ; it was time to begin.

“And when did you have your last meal ? ” she asked softly.

But at that moment the door-handle turned.

“Rosemary, may I come in ? ” It was Philip.

“Of course.”

He came in. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said, and stopped and stared.

“It’s quite all right,” said Rosemary smiling. “This is my friend, Miss——”

“Smith, madam,” said the languid figure, who was strangely still and unafraid.

“Smith,” said Rosemary. “We are going to have a little talk.”

“Oh, yes,” said Philip. “Quite,” and his eye caught sight of the coat and hat on the floor. He came over to the fire and turned his back to it. “It’s a beastly afternoon,” he said curiously, still looking at that listless figure, looking at its hands and boots, and then at Rosemary again.

“Yes, isn’t it?” said Rosemary enthusiastically. ” Vile.”

Philip smiled his charming smile. “As a matter of fact,” said he, ” I wanted you to come into the library for a moment. Would you ? Will Miss Smith excuse us ? ”

The big eyes were raised to him, but Rosemary answered for her. ” Of course she will.” And they went out of the room together.

“I say,” said Philip, when they were alone. “Explain. Who is she? What does it all mean?”

Rosemary, laughing, leaned against the door and said : “I picked her up in Curzon Street. Really. She’s a real pick-up. She asked me for the price of a cup of tea, and I brought her home with me.”

“But what on earth are you going to do with her ? ” cried Philip.

“Be nice to her,” said Rosemary quickly. “Be frightfully nice to her. Look after her. I don’t know how. We haven’t talked yet. But show her—treat her—make her feel——”

“My darling girl,” said Philip, ” you’re quite mad, you know. It simply can’t be done.”

“I knew you’d say that,” retorted Rosemary. “Why not ? I want to. Isn’t that a reason ? And besides, one’s always reading about these things. I decided——”

“But,” said Philip slowly, and he cut the end of a cigar, “she’s so astonishingly pretty.”

“Pretty?” Rosemary was so surprised that she blushed. “Do you think so ? I—I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Good Lord!” Philip struck a match. “She’s absolutely lovely. Look again, my child. I was bowled over when I came into your room just now. However… I think you’re making a ghastly mistake. Sorry, darling, if I’m crude and all that. But let me know if Miss Smith is going to dine with us in time for me to look up The Milliner’s Gazette.”

“ You absurd creature!” said Rosemary, and she went out of the library, but not back to her bedroom. She went to her writing-room and sat down at her desk. Pretty ! Absolutely lovely ! Bowled over ! Her heart beat like a. heavy bell. Pretty ! Lovely ! She drew her cheque-book towards her. But no, cheques would be no use, of course. She opened a drawer and took out five pound notes, looked at them, put two back, and holding the three squeezed in her hand, she went back to her bedroom.

Half an hour later Philip was still in the library, when Rosemary came in.

“I only wanted to tell you,” said she, and she leaned against the door again and looked at him with her dazzled exotic gaze, “Miss Smith won’t dine with us to-night.”

Philip put down the paper. “Oh, what’s happened? Previous engagement? ”

Rosemary came over and sat down on his knee. “She insisted on going,” said she, “so I gave the poor little thing a present of money. I couldn’t keep her against her will, could I? ” she added softly.

Rosemary had just done her hair, darkened her eyes a little, and put on her pearls. She put up her hands and touched Philip’s cheeks.

“Do you like me?” said she, and her tone, sweet, husky, troubled him.

“I like you awfully,” he said, and he held her tighter. “Kiss me.”

There was a pause.

Then Rosemary said dreamily. “I saw a fascinating little box to-day. It cost twenty-eight guineas. May I have it?”

Philip jumped her on his knee. “You may, little wasteful one,” said he.

But that was not really what Rosemary wanted to say.

“Philip,” she whispered, and she pressed his head against her bosom, “am I pretty ?”

Let’s examine the short story using our three approaches to see how we can use power relationships to explore texts.

Marxist Questions

• Class Disparities : How does the story portray the economic differences between Rosemary and the girl she meets? In what ways do Rosemary’s wealth and privilege affect the dynamics between them?
• Commodification of Art and Luxury : Explore the theme of consumerism and the commodification of art and luxury goods in the story. How does Rosemary’s interaction with the shopkeeper reflect larger societal attitudes towards material possessions?
• Labor and Social Class : Analyze the role of labor and social class in the story. How are the characters positioned in terms of social class, and how does their economic status influence their actions and relationships?
• Exploitation and Power Dynamics : Discuss the power dynamics between Rosemary and the girl she meets. How does Rosemary’s offer to take the girl home reflect underlying structures of power and privilege? In what ways does Rosemary’s benevolence reinforce or challenge existing social hierarchies?
• Alienation and Isolation : Explore the theme of alienation and isolation, considering both Rosemary’s privileged but potentially lonely existence and the girl’s apparent vulnerability. How do these characters experience and navigate their respective social environments?

Remember, Marxism often focuses on economic and social structures, so consider how these structures are reflected in the characters’ relationships, choices, and the overall narrative.

Example of Marxist thesis statement: In “A Cup of Tea” by Katherine Mansfield, the exploitation of a poor girl by a wealthy woman reveals the way in which socioeconomic status keeps the bourgesoie from being able to act morally toward those of a different social class. Even when she thinks she means well, Rosemary cannot escape the transactional consumerism that defines her existence.

Postcolonial Questions

Next, let’s explore the story through a postcolonial lens.

• Colonial Influence on Aesthetics : How does Rosemary’s fascination with the little box and her interactions with the shopkeeper reflect colonial influences on aesthetics? Consider Mansfield’s own background and how colonialism might have shaped perceptions of beauty and value.
• Othering and Exoticism : Analyze the theme of othering and exoticism in the story, particularly in Rosemary’s interactions with the shopkeeper and her decision to bring the girl home. How does Mansfield’s own experiences and relationships contribute to or challenge the portrayal of the “exotic” other?
• Representation of Indigenous Culture : Explore the representation of indigenous culture in the story, considering Mansfield’s own connection with Maori culture. How does the story depict or neglect aspects of indigenous identity, and in what ways might it reflect the author’s relationship with New Zealand’s cultural landscape?
• Cultural Appropriation and Power Dynamics : Discuss the power dynamics and potential cultural appropriation in Rosemary’s actions. How might Mansfield’s personal experiences inform our understanding of the power imbalances present in the story, especially in the context of colonial history?
• Postcolonial Feminism : Investigate the intersectionality of postcolonial feminism in the story, taking into account Mansfield’s own experiences. How do issues of gender, race, and colonialism intersect, and what insights can be gained by examining the characters and their relationships through this lens?

Consider how Mansfield’s background and experiences as a person from New Zealand might have influenced her perspectives on colonialism, indigenous cultures, and power dynamics. This lens can provide valuable insights into the story’s underlying themes and messages.

Example of a postcolonial thesis statement: Katherine Mansfield, a New Zealand modernist author who was the product of British imperialism, once loved an indigenous Māori woman, but set her aside for a life among London’s literati. Mansfield’s 1921 short story “A Cup of Tea” reveals the inescapable influence of colonial power structures through Rosemary’s obsession with a costly foreign trinket and the girl’s equation of her worth with a cup of tea, which serves as a symbol for the carelessness with which Mansfield and her peers treated indigenous lives and culture.

Ethnic Studies Questions

Finally, how could we approach this story from an ethnic studies lens? As I noted in the introduction to this chapter, ethnic studies, not postcolonial studies, is the critical approach used for American authors who are not white. As Christine MacLeod observes regarding the divide between postcolonial and African American studies, “the fact remains that with neither a territorial identity nor physical separation from the metropolitan centre, black American cannot strictly be said to fit any standard model of the colonial or postcolonial experience” (p. 51).

Because Katherine Mansfield is a New Zealand author and part of the British colonial structure, we would probably use a postcolonial rather than an ethnic studies lens to analyze her work. One subset of ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, might apply. Indigenous studies are often used to consider how texts function in a dominant culture. The Māori are the Indigenous people of New Zealand. For Māori studies, we could explore the story using the traditional knowledge, culture, knowledge, and beliefs of Māori and Indigenous peoples. “A Cup of Tea” does not feature any Māori characters, so an ethnic studies approach would focus on the absence of Māori culture and the way that the dominant culture has replaced the traditional Indigenous one.

A better Mansfield short story to use for an ethnic studies approach would be “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped.”   In this short story, written in 1912, Mansfield relates the story of a young white girl who follows two Māori women to their settlement, where they feed her and take her to the ocean to play. The story ends with white policemen “rescuing” Pearl. Because the story is told through a child’s point of view, ultimately, the nature of the kidnapping is ambigious. She goes willingly with the Māori women but resists the white policemen.

You’ll notice that the questions below about “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped” feel very similar to postcolonial criticism questions about “A Cup of Tea.”

• How do the Māori women in the story resist colonial control and assert their agency in the face of White hegemony?
• In what ways does the story challenge the dominant colonial narratives of New Zealand as a “settled” and “tamed” land, presenting instead a more nuanced understanding of Māori culture and resistance?
• How does the character of Pearl Button represent the colonial gaze, and what does her fascination with the Māori women and their culture reveal about the power dynamics between colonizers and the colonized?
• How do the Māori women use their knowledge of their environment and traditional practices to navigate and resist the colonial presence in their lives?
• How does the ending of the story, with the Māori women watching Pearl Button’s departure, challenge the idea of colonial rescue and instead suggests the possibility of mutual understanding and solidarity between the colonized and the colonizers?

Example of an Ethnic Studies thesis statement: “In the context of their original publication, Mansfield’s Rhythm writings reveal the author’s ambivalent relationship to metropolitan primitivism—ranging from romantic idealization of the Māoris in ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped’ to satirical mockery of the western European fascination with exotic cultures and artifacts in ‘Sunday Lunch,’ a sketch prefiguring the themes of Mansfield’s later story ‘Bliss’ (1918). Yet while these writings largely frustrate metropolitan desires for quaint exoticism, I argue that as a Pākehā New Zealander with a penchant for cultural cross-dressing (both in life and in print), Mansfield did not fully escape the dynamics she ridiculed.” (Snyder 139).

Note: “Pākehā is a word for a white New Zealander.

The Limitations of Marxist, Postcolonial, and Ethnic Studies Criticism

While Marxist, postcolonial, and ethnic studies approaches can provide valuable insights into literary texts, each approach has its limitations.

• Economic Determinism: Marxist criticism can sometimes oversimplify complex human motivations by reducing them to economic factors. It may neglect the role of other aspects such as psychology, individual agency, or cultural influences.
• Neglect of Other Power Structures: While economic structures are central, Marxist criticism may downplay or overlook other power structures, such as those based on gender, race, or personal relationships.
• Homogenization of Cultures: Postcolonial criticism might risk oversimplifying diverse cultures within a colonized region, treating them as homogeneous entities. This can lead to the erasure of internal conflicts and complexities within these cultures.
• Western-Centric Perspectives: There is a risk of perpetuating a Western-centric view, as postcolonial theory often originates from Western academic institutions. This may unintentionally reproduce power imbalances (the scholarship example you read identifies this limitation).
• Overemphasis on Identity : Sometimes, ethnic studies can focus so much on racial, cultural, or national identities that it may overlook other important aspects of the text, such as its formal qualities, narrative structure, or thematic elements.
• Homogenization : There’s a risk of essentializing or homogenizing diverse experiences within a particular racial or ethnic group. For instance, if we assume that all African American experiences are the same, or all Asian American experiences are the same, we can overlook the complex and varied experiences of individuals within these groups.
• Political and Ideological Biases : Ethnic studies can sometimes be influenced by political or ideological biases, which might limit the scope of analysis or lead to particular interpretations being favored over others.

It’s important to note that these issues don’t necessarily negate the value of these approaches; however,  scholars and critics should be cautious to avoid oversimplification or bias. Combining multiple critical perspectives can often provide a more comprehensive understanding of a literary text.

Post Script: What about Critical Race Theory?

It seems like everywhere we look, we hear someone talking about Critical Race Theory. Can we apply CRT to literary texts?

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is one of the more well-known frameworks that can be considered under the broader lens of New Historicism. CRT examines how race and racism operate in society. It emerged in the United States in the late 1970s as a response to the limitations of traditional civil rights approaches to addressing racial inequality. CRT seeks to understand how racism and discrimination are embedded in social structures and institutions, and how they are perpetuated through everyday interactions and practices.

CRT can be defined as “a set of ideas holding that racial bias is inherent in many parts of western society, especially in its legal and social institutions, on the basis of their having been primarily designed for and implemented by white people.” (Oxford Languages). According to Mateo Castelli, “Critical Race Theory can be used to deconstruct the power dynamics that surround race and racism through everyday societal structures and institutions.”

In literature, CRT is applied to examine the ways in which race and racism are represented and constructed in literary texts. With a CRT approach, scholars are interested in exploring how literature reflects and perpetuates racial inequality, and in how it can be used to challenge and disrupt racist ideologies and practices. CRT emphasizes the importance of examining the intersectionality of race with other forms of identity and oppression, such as gender, sexuality, class, and ability. It also emphasizes the importance of centering the perspectives and experiences of people of color in literary analysis, and in understanding how their experiences are shaped by systemic racism and discrimination.

One of the key principles of CRT is the importance of recognizing the role of power in shaping social relations and discourse. CRT seeks to examine how power operates in literary texts, and how it is used to perpetuate racial hierarchies and maintain the status quo. Literary texts may be used as artifacts to demonstrate these power structures. However, in literary studies, African American studies criticism (a subset of ethnic studies) is a more common approach.

Marxist, Postcolonial, and Ethnic Studies Scholars

• Terry Eagleton
• Antonio Gramsci
• Raymond Williams

Postcolonial

• Edward Said
• Frantz Fanon
• Homi Bhabha

Ethnic Studies (African American/Black)

• W.E.B. DuBois
• James Baldwin
• Amiri Baraka
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 

Ethnic Studies (Chicano/a)

• Rodolfo Acuña

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Ethnic Studies (Indigenous/First Nations)

Wikipedia lists several important Indigenous scholars here.

Critical Race Theory

• Kimberlé Crenshaw
• Derrick Bell

Further Reading

• Biondi, Martha. “Controversial Blackness: The Historical Development & Future Trajectory of African American Studies.” Daedalus , vol. 140, no. 2, 2011, pp. 226–37. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/23047464 . Accessed 1 Mar. 2024.
• Brooker, Peter. A Glossary of Literary and Cultural Theory . 3rd ed. Routledge, 2017.
• Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Psychology Press, 2002.
• Figueira, Dorothy. “The Profits of Postcolonialism.”  Comparative Literature , vol. 52, no. 3, Summer 2000, p. 246.  EBSCOhost , https://doi-org.cwi.idm.oclc.org/10.1215/-52-3-246 .
• Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: An Introduction . New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
• Joyce A. Joyce. “The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism.” New Literary History , vol. 18, no. 2, 1987, pp. 335–44. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/468732 . Accessed 1 Mar. 2024.
• Loomba, Ania.  Colonialism/Postcolonialism . London: Routledge, 2005.
• MacLeod, Christine. “Black American Literature and the Postcolonial Debate.” The Yearbook of English Studies , vol. 27, 1997, pp. 51–65. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/3509132 . Accessed 13 Mar. 2024.
• Martinez-Echazabal, Lourdes. “Mestizaje and the Discourse of National/Cultural Identity in Latin America, 1845-1959.” Latin American Perspectives , vol. 25, no. 3, 1998, pp. 21–42. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/2634165 . Accessed 1 Mar. 2024.
• Mishra, Vijay. “Postcolonial Theory.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias. 30 April 2020. https://oxfordre.com/literature/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1001  Accessed October 13, 2023.
• Mitchell, Angelyn, editor. Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present . Duke University Press, 1994. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1134fjj . Accessed 1 Mar. 2024.
• Snyder, Carey. “Katherine Mansfield, Rhythm , and Metropolitan Primitivism.” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies , vol. 5, no. 2, 2014, pp. 138–59. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.5325/jmodeperistud.5.2.0138 . Accessed 1 Mar. 2024.
• Young, Robert J. C.  Postcolonial Theory: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide

2019, Historical Materialism

Appeared online here: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/reading-guides/marxist-literary-criticism-introductory-reading-guide?fbclid=IwAR2vioz8HnlwSHpgoUdnH6cnwFNE7D2gb7juShyG0-z2LxNmyzYevqJLH8I

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In 20th century, literary criticism has witnessed influences from many schools of critical inquiries. One of the major schools is Marxist literary criticism. This paper highlights the major tenets of Marxist literary criticism. In other words, it studies the Marxist approach to literature.

complex, more than Shakespeare because we know more about the lives of women—Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf included. Both the victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and have real sources, everywhere in the environment, built into society, language, the structures of thought. They will go on being tapped and explored by poets, among others. We can neither deny them, nor will we rest there. A new generation of women poets is already working out of the psychic energy released when women begin to move out towards what the feminist philosopher Mary Daly has described as the "new space" on the boundaries of patriarchy. 8 Women are speaking to and of women in these poems, out of a newly released courage to name, to love each other, to share risk and grief and celebration. To the eye of a feminist, the work of Western male poets now writing reveals a deep, fatalistic pessimism as to the possibilities of change, whether societal or personal, along with a familiar and threadbare use of women (and nature) as redemptive on the one hand, threatening on the other; and a new tide of phallocentric sadism and overt woman-hating which matches the sexual brutality of recent films. "Political" poetry by men remains stranded amid the struggles for power among male groups; in condemning U.S. imperialism or the Chilean junta the poet can claim to speak for the oppressed while remaining, as male, part of a system of sexual oppression. The enemy is always outside the self, the struggle somewhere else. The mood of isolation, self-pity, and self-imitation that pervades "nonpolitical" poetry suggests that a profound change in masculine consciousness will have to precede any new male poetic—or other—inspiration. The creative energy of patri-archy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction. As women, we have our work cut out for us. 1976 In the preface to his book, Eagleton writes ironically: "No aoubt we shall soon see Marxist criticism comfortably wedged between Freudian and mythological approaches to literature, as yet one more stimulating academic 'approach,' one more well-tilled field of inquiry for students to tramp." He, urges against such an attitude, believing it "dangerous" to the centrality of Marxism as an agent of social change. Despite his warning, however, and because of his claims for the significance of Marxist criticism, Eagleton's opening chapters, dealing with tuo topics central to literary criticism, are here presented for some thoughtful "tramping." "Marxism," which in some quarters remains a pejorative term, is in fact an indispensable concern in modern intellectual history. Developed primarily as a way of examining historical, economic, and social issues, Marxist doctrine does not deal explicitly with theories of literature; consequently, there is no one orthodox Marxist school (as there is an orthodox Freudianism), but rather a diversity of Marxist readings. Eagleton's own discussion partly illustrates this diversity: he uses the familiar derogatory term "vulgar Marxism" to refe-to the simplistic deterministic notion that a literary work is nothing more than the direct product of its socioeconomic base. Aware also of how Marxist theory can be perverted, Eagleton in another chapter 's scorn-" ful of such politically motivated corruptions as the Stalinist doctrine From Marxism and Literary Criticism;

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socialist Realism

new Historicism

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Marxist criticism

Quick reference.

A form of cultural criticism that applies Marxist theory to the interpretation of cultural texts. Since neither Karl Marx nor his collaborator Friedrich Engels ever developed a specific form of cultural criticism themselves, Marxist Criticism has been extrapolated from their writings. As there is no one form of Marxism, so there is no one form of Marxist Criticism. This is not to say that the different variants of Marxist Criticism do not have certain features in common, but it is nevertheless also true that there is considerable debate within the field concerning those differences. In common, then, all forms of Marxist Criticism assume the following: (i) that no artistic object can be understood in isolation from the social, cultural, and historical conditions in which it was produced; (ii) that all categories by which artistic objects might be measured are themselves constructions that need to be evaluated from the perspective of the social, cultural, and historical conditions that gave rise to them; (iii) that all artistic productions are commodities that can and must be understood in terms of the production of surplus value; (iv) that art is a site for the playing out of a symbolic form of class struggle. The principle area of difference in Marxist Criticism is the issue of whether or not it should be prescriptive or not: in other words, is it the job of Marxist Criticism to determine what art should be like? There have been powerful movements in favour of this position—the most noted is of course socialist realism. This position has also been championed very strongly by such critics as György Lukács. But there is a similarly powerful movement against it and in recent years it has generally been agreed that it is neither possible nor desirable to prescribe what art should be like. But if that isn't the task of Marxist Criticism, then what is? As is the case with psychoanalysis, the response to this question is twofold: there is an attempt to understand the nature of the object (i.e. what makes it art and why) and alongside it there is the attempt to understand the subject's response to particular art objects. In both cases, the primary conceptual tool is the notion of ideology. Some of the major Marxist critics are: Terry Eagleton, his Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) was immensely influential; Fredric Jameson, his Marxism and Form (1971), and more particularly The Political Unconscious (1981), are perhaps the most sophisticated attempts to synthesize the critical methodologies from a broad spectrum of approaches; Lukács, although a troubled figure, his History and Class Consciousness (1923) continues to be studied today and it is in many ways a foundational text for the field; Pierre Macherey, whose Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, translated as A Theory of Literary Production (1978), is generally regarded as the definitive application of Althusser's work to literature; and Raymond Williams, a hugely influential figure, particularly in the nascent field of Cultural Studies.

(i) that no artistic object can be understood in isolation from the social, cultural, and historical conditions in which it was produced; (ii) that all categories by which artistic objects might be measured are themselves constructions that need to be evaluated from the perspective of the social, cultural, and historical conditions that gave rise to them; (iii) that all artistic productions are commodities that can and must be understood in terms of the production of surplus value; (iv) that art is a site for the playing out of a symbolic form of class struggle.

From:   Marxist Criticism   in  A Dictionary of Critical Theory »

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12 Texts for Introducing Marxist Criticism

• Instructional and Assessment Strategies , Reading Instruction

When my students study literary criticism , I usually introduce Marxist criticism after feminist criticism . In part, I introduce these two lenses in close order because they are both political lenses. They’re not political in the sense of partisan politics. But they both deal with how literature navigates issues of power and privilege.

However, I usually introduce Marxist criticism after feminist criticism because students stumble over the “Marxist” title. Students know Karl Marx from their social studies classes. And they know about communism from reading The Crucible . Sometimes that leads students to believe that Marxist criticism is all about communism. So I spend a lot of time upfront addressing this misunderstanding.

From that point forward, we apply Marxist criticism by evaluating how social class and privilege intersect. At the high school level, I work to keep criticism as straightforward as possible. In other words, we’re asking these questions over and over:

• First, what social classes or hierarchies appear in the text?
• Second, which characters have privilege? What does privilege look like in the text? How does access to or distance from privilege affect a character?
• Similarly, how does the text treat characters from various social classes? How does membership in a particular social class affect a character’s actions and/or how they are treated by other characters?

This post this post may contain affiliate links .  Please read the  Terms of Use .

Introducing Marxist Criticism

At the high school level, students don’t need all the vocabulary of Marxist criticism. However, the concept of “privilege” is so closely related to Marxist criticism that we always explore this term. Most of my students are at least familiar with the concept of privilege even if they can’t define it. For this reason, the essay “ Privileged ” by Kyle Korver can be a good text for introducing and unpacking this term.

Oftentimes, I find short works to be useful in exploring a new concept. The brevity of poetry can make it ideal for exploring a new idea. To practice applying Marxist criticism, teachers might consider “ Richard Cory ” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. This poem has a straightforward “plot.” The content of the poem is also high interest, so students will be engaged. Then, students can practice applying Marxist criticism to explore the relationship between Richard Cory and the speaker. Grab “Richard Cory” and two more of Robinson’s most-famous poems in this great bundle !

Additionally, a short story like “ A Worn Path ” by Eudora Welty is a good tool for practicing Marxist criticism. For one, this is a short short story, and the plot is clear and easy to follow. Furthermore, social class plays a clear role in how the main character is treated and how she interacts with the white, urban world. Read it here .

Short Stories

Short stories are the primary way that I teach students to apply literary criticism. These three short stories provide readers with plenty of opportunities to evaluate how social class and privilege affect a text’s meaning.

• First, “ A White Heron ” by Sarah Orne Jewett is straightforward enough that students can usually read the story independently. Then, students can apply literary criticism with a partner or small group. Read it here .
• Second, “ Berenice ” by Edgar Allan Poe may seem like an unusual suggestion. However, this text is high interest, and the main character’s life would be wildly different if he didn’t have privilege. He simply could not have gotten away with his crimes if his social class didn’t protect him. Read it here .
• Finally, “ Winter Dreams ” by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the longest short story on this list. My students usually enjoy this story because the main characters are so infuriating! The social classes of the main characters play a clear part in their interactions. Of the texts mentioned so far, this is the only one with a character actively working to advance his social class. This text also lends itself to feminist criticism . Read it here .

Grab all my lesson plans for these short stories plus “A Worn Path” and lessons for 5 other short stories in the 9-12 Short Stories Bundle !

Longer Works

Longer texts take more time to read, so I usually incorporate longer works after we have tried different critical lenses. I also like to choose texts that lend themselves to a variety of critical lenses. All the longer works on this list would be good candidates for historical criticism , too! Exploring the intersection of history and literature also adds another layer of complexity to Marxist criticism.

• First, The Crucible by Arthur Miller is an ideal candidate for applying several critical lenses. The allegory for McCarthyism lends itself to historical criticism. Also, Miller makes it clear that social class plays an important part in the Salem Witch Trials. Check out my favorite activities for teaching The Crucible .
• Similarly, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the first texts I think of when discussing Marxist criticism. The symbolism of East and West Egg and the Valley of Ashes lends itself beautifully to evaluating the role of social class and privilege in the text. These are my favorite activities for teaching The Great Gatsby .
• Additionally, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is not a text I usually associate with literary criticism. However, social class is an unavoidable part of teaching and reading this novel. The text also covers issues related to race and gender, so it suits a variety of critical lenses. I also pair To Kill a Mockingbird with a variety of related texts that provide a richer view of Maycomb.
• Finally, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is a text that clearly lends itself to Marxist criticism. Because social class plays such an important part in this novel, I usually start students with this primer about class in the Victorian Era. I also love this collection of activities for helping students engage with Pride and Prejudice .

Honorable Mentions

These two texts lend themselves to Marxist criticism although they are not my first choices.

First, the poem “ The Last of the Light Brigade ” by Rudyard Kipling focuses on the lives of the brave survivors of “ The Light Brigade .” Because this premise of this poem is based on another poem, it takes a little more time to get students to the Marxist criticism. That being said, this poem also connects well with Pride and Prejudice because it emphasizes the hardship of life in Victorian England. Read it here .

Finally, Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare is one of my favorite plays to read with students! While this play more closely aligns with archetypal criticism, social class also plays a role in the drama. The citizens in the play are cast as a moronic, gullible mob. That they come from the plebian class and not from the patrician class of the main characters suits Marxist criticism. Julius Caesar also goes well with these unexpected text pairings !

What other texts would you recommend for teaching Marxist criticism?

Further Reading

Since literary criticism is one of my passions, I’ve written quite a bit about it. Check out these related posts and resources:

• 5 Reasons to Include Literary Criticism, and 5 Ways to Make it Happen
• How to Introduce Deconstructionist Literary Criticism
• Teaching at the Intersection of History and Literature
• 13 Texts for Introducing Psychoanalytical Criticism
• 8 Ways to Bring Creativity into the Classroom
• 6 Texts for Teaching Biographical Criticism
• 40 Texts for Teaching Literary Criticism
• Historical and Biographical Criticism
• Deconstructionist Criticism Bundle
• All Literary Criticism Resources
• Introducing Literary Criticism
• Feminist Criticism Bundle
• Historical Criticism

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Marxist Theory & Criticism

Primary sources   i   marxist theory & criticism.

Louis Althusser , " Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, 1971).

Louis Althusser , Pour Marx (1965, For Marx , trans Ben Brewster, 1969).

Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar , Lire le "Capital" (1965, Reading "Capital , " trans. Ben Brewster 1970).

Renée Balibar , Les Français fictifs: Le Rapport des styles littéraires au français national (1974).

Renée Balibar and Dominique Laporte , Le Français national: Politique et pratique de la langue nationale sous la révolution (1974).

Terry Eagleton , Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (1976).

Fredric Jameson , The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981).

Fredric Jameson , The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972).

Pierre Macherey , A quoi pense la littérature ? (1990, The Object of Literature, trans. David Macey, 1995).

Pierre Macherey , Pour une théorie de la production littéraire , (1966, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, 1978).

Pierre Macherey and Étienne Balibar , " Sur la littérature comme forme idéologique: Quelques hypothèses marxistes " (1974), " Literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist Propositions, " Praxis 5 (1981).

Michel Pêcheux , Les Vérités de La Palice: Linguistique, sémantique, philosophie (1976 Language, Semantics, and Ideology: Stating the Obvious , trans.  Harbans Nagpal, (1982).

Nicos Ar. Poulantzas , L’État, le pouvoir, le socialisme (1978, State, Power, Socialism , trans.  Patrick Camiller, 1980).

Aijaz Ahmad , In Theory (1993).

Aijaz Ahmad , "The Third World in Jameson’s Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Social Text 31–32 (1992).

Étienne Balibar , Masses, Classes, Ideas (trans. James Swenson, 1994).

Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein , Race, nation, classe: Les Identités ambiguës (1988, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities , trans. Chris Turner, 1991).

Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio , eds., Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory (1996).

Jacques Derrida , Spectres de Marx (1993, Specters of Marx , trans.  Peggy Kamuf,. 1994).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri , Empire (2000).

Rosemary Hennessy , Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (1993).

Peter Hitchcock , Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism (1999).

Fredric Jameson , The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992).

Fredric Jameson , Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (1990).

Fredric Jameson , The Political Unconscious (1981).

Fredric Jameson , "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984).

Fredric Jameson , Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).

Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean , Materialist Feminisms (1993).

Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg , Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective (1995).

Karl Marx , "Eighteenth Brumaire," Surveys from Exile (ed. and intro. David Fernbach intro. Ben Fowkes, et al. 1973).

Karl Marx , Grundrisse, (1953, Grundrisse., trans. Martin Nicolaus, 1973).

Karl Marx , Das Kapital , vol.  1 (1867, Capital, vol. 1,  Ben Fowkes, 1976).

Karl Marx , Karl Marx : Early Writings (trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, 1975).

Toril Moi , Sexual/Textual Politics (1985).

Toril Moi and Janice Radway , eds.,  Materialist Feminism , special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 93.4 (1994).

Antonio Negri , Marx oltre Marx (1979, Marx Beyond Marx, trans. Harry Cleave, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano 1984).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993).

Slavoj Žižek , The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989).

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Marxist Theory & Criticism

Primary sources   i   marxist theory & criticism.

Louis Althusser , " Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, 1971).

Louis Althusser , Pour Marx (1965, For Marx , trans Ben Brewster, 1969).

Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar , Lire le "Capital" (1965, Reading "Capital , " trans. Ben Brewster 1970).

Renée Balibar , Les Français fictifs: Le Rapport des styles littéraires au français national (1974).

Renée Balibar and Dominique Laporte , Le Français national: Politique et pratique de la langue nationale sous la révolution (1974).

Terry Eagleton , Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (1976).

Fredric Jameson , The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981).

Fredric Jameson , The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972).

Pierre Macherey , A quoi pense la littérature ? (1990, The Object of Literature, trans. David Macey, 1995).

Pierre Macherey , Pour une théorie de la production littéraire , (1966, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, 1978).

Pierre Macherey and Étienne Balibar , " Sur la littérature comme forme idéologique: Quelques hypothèses marxistes " (1974), " Literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist Propositions, " Praxis 5 (1981).

Michel Pêcheux , Les Vérités de La Palice: Linguistique, sémantique, philosophie (1976 Language, Semantics, and Ideology: Stating the Obvious , trans.  Harbans Nagpal, (1982).

Nicos Ar. Poulantzas , L’État, le pouvoir, le socialisme (1978, State, Power, Socialism , trans.  Patrick Camiller, 1980).

Aijaz Ahmad , In Theory (1993).

Aijaz Ahmad , "The Third World in Jameson’s Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Social Text 31–32 (1992).

Étienne Balibar , Masses, Classes, Ideas (trans. James Swenson, 1994).

Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein , Race, nation, classe: Les Identités ambiguës (1988, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities , trans. Chris Turner, 1991).

Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio , eds., Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory (1996).

Jacques Derrida , Spectres de Marx (1993, Specters of Marx , trans.  Peggy Kamuf,. 1994).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri , Empire (2000).

Rosemary Hennessy , Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (1993).

Peter Hitchcock , Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism (1999).

Fredric Jameson , The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992).

Fredric Jameson , Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (1990).

Fredric Jameson , The Political Unconscious (1981).

Fredric Jameson , "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984).

Fredric Jameson , Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).

Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean , Materialist Feminisms (1993).

Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg , Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective (1995).

Karl Marx , "Eighteenth Brumaire," Surveys from Exile (ed. and intro. David Fernbach intro. Ben Fowkes, et al. 1973).

Karl Marx , Grundrisse, (1953, Grundrisse., trans. Martin Nicolaus, 1973).

Karl Marx , Das Kapital , vol.  1 (1867, Capital, vol. 1,  Ben Fowkes, 1976).

Karl Marx , Karl Marx : Early Writings (trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, 1975).

Toril Moi , Sexual/Textual Politics (1985).

Toril Moi and Janice Radway , eds.,  Materialist Feminism , special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 93.4 (1994).

Antonio Negri , Marx oltre Marx (1979, Marx Beyond Marx, trans. Harry Cleave, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano 1984).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993).

Slavoj Žižek , The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989).

Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
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The story The Lottery continues to bring forth heated debates since its publication. The story touches the nerves of people as they try to interpret its meaning. The focus of this paper will be on a Marxist criticism of the story.

Kosenko (1985) posits that the story employs Marxist undertones. According to him, the story symbolises an attack on capitalism. The story attacks the ideology and social order of the town. One Marxist explanation for the story lies in the symbol of the black dot made on a paper for the lottery. The black color of the dot represents evil that is linked to business, which in turn stands for capitalism.

For example, Mr. Summers who draws the dot is involved in the coal business. He represents the powerful class in capitalism that has the control of the town both politically and economically because Mr. Summers also administers the lottery (Kosenko, 1985).

Moreover, the location of the lottery at the town square between two buildings- the post office and the bank represents the political and economic power of the government and those in power such as Mr. Graves and Mr. Summers. The common people stand no chance against the capitalist order.

The lottery is an old tradition that represents the rigidity of a capitalist society. The ritual of the lottery has been in the town for so long that the people no longer know its origin but continue to practise it annually. When some people suggest that other towns have abandoned the ritual, the Old man rebukes them and says that the ritual must go on because it is tradition.

The old man represents people in a capitalist society who opt for maintenance of the status quo. They are afraid of abandoning the way they do things to continue benefiting at the expense of the majority. The people are deluded by the lottery that the society is democratic hence they will not criticize the ruling class.

The people in the society are made to believe that the lottery is democratic and anyone stands an equal chance of selection. There is a possibility that Summers knows the paper with the black dot and his family members are safe from being stoned at the lottery. Thus, we can say the lottery is an election for the powerful but a random selection for the common people.

The story also depicts the social order in a capitalist society in which few powerful individuals control the rest of the society. For example, the powerful people in the lottery are Mr. Summers, Mr. Graves the postmaster and Mr. Martin the grocer respectively. These three individuals are powerful in the small town due to their position.

To illustrate this point when the lottery is picked it is asked who has picked it, was it the Watsons or the Dunbars. The two families mentioned are not powerful in the town. Why did they not ask whether the Graves or the summers had it? This shows that the powerful are in control of the lottery and have no chance of being victims of stoning.

In addition, the women in this society are low in status. They have no power and only the men in their families can pick the lottery for the families and if the man of the family is absent, his son represents him instead of the wife. Just like in a capitalist society, people who have no power have no say in the affairs of the society, which is left to the powerful few.

Finally, the author of the story seems to criticize a society that oppresses the weak and depends on outdated practices to maintain discriminative social order. The lottery helps the powerful to continue to control the town in other words capitalism goes on to enable Mr. Summers and his likes remain in positions of power.

Reference List

Kosenko, P. (1985): A Marxist-Feminist Reading of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’ New Orleans Review, 12, 27-32.

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IvyPanda. (2018, May 24). Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/marxist-criticism-on-the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson/

"Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay." IvyPanda , 24 May 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/marxist-criticism-on-the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay'. 24 May.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay." May 24, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/marxist-criticism-on-the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson/.

1. IvyPanda . "Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay." May 24, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/marxist-criticism-on-the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay." May 24, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/marxist-criticism-on-the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson/.

Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Marxism — Marxist Literary Criticism of “Grinch Stole Christmas”

Marxist Literary Criticism of "Grinch Stole Christmas"

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