MARXIST CRITICISM

Presented
Presented
By
By
Ata
Ata ul
ul ghafer
ghafer and
and Shoiba
Shoiba sabir
sabir
Department
Department of
of Applied
Applied Linguistics
Linguistics
GCUF
GCUF
OUTLINE
• Beginning and basics of Marxism
• Marxist Criticism: general
• Marxist Criticism: Main Streams
• Leninist-Marxist criticism
• Engelsian-Marxist criticism
• Marxist criticism: Louis Althusser's influence
• What Marxist critics do?
 INTRODUCTION

• Marxist criticism is the literary theory based on the socialist - dialectic doctrine of the
German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) and sociologist Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). 
• They called their economic theories 'Communism', according to their believe in the state
ownership of industry, transport. Rather than private ownership. Marx and Engels
proclaimed the advent of Communism in their work Communist Manifesto, published in
1848.
• The aim of Marxism is to bring about a classless society, based on the common ownership of
the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Marxism is a materialist philosophy:
that is, it tries to explain things without assuming the existence of a world or of forces
beyond the natural world around us, and the society we live in. It looks for concrete,
scientific, logical explanations of the world of observable fact.
• Religion is a tablet of opium
• Different to other philosophies which only try to understand the world Marxism
both: intends to transform it and fore see the advent of the progress as a fruit of the
different social class struggle.
• Marxism analyses and combat the modern industrial Capitalism, a system which
allows the exploitation of the man for another man, or the exploitation of a social
class for another.
• A result of this unfair system is the laborers are in a state of alienation, which means
that they are dishonored and obligated to do monotonous tasks which don’t allow
them to improve their situation.
• But also, alienated workers have suffered the process of reification, which according
to Marx's main work, Das Kapitalis related to the way the owners of the capital think
about the workers: people without any dignity, working force or simple labor things.
• This is also one of the main claims to the economist, that they see people as cold
facts and numbers.
.
MARXIST LITERARY CRITICISM: GENERAL POINT OF VIEW

• Even though, Marx and Engels did not produce a theory of literature.
Nevertheless, their perspective toward literature and art is evidently
undogmatic. Namely, they preferred the good art, free from economic
circumstances.
• As cultured and highly-educated Germans, they felt reverence for
'great' art and literature typical of their class, and desire to highlight
the difference between art and propaganda.
• Nonetheless, Marxist literary critics, holds that the author's social
class and predominant ideology (values, tacit assumptions, viewpoint,
half realized allegiances, and so on)are more influent on what is
written by a member of that class.
 CONTI…
• Therefore, the authors are no seen as autonomous-inspired beings, whose talent and
creativity allow them to produce original and timeless art oeuvres, rather, Marxist
perspective seems authors as determined by their social contexts.
• Traditional Marxist criticism usually deals with history in a very generalized way. Namely,
it discusses both: clashes of large historical forces and conflicts between social classes.
 LENINIST-MARXIST CRITICISM 

• Is the result of 1930s Soviet society's reaction, where the State started to control cultural
manifestations such as art, literature and so forth. As a result, liberal views were considered
illegal and Lenin's writing point of view was imposed.
• According to Lenin's outlook, literature must become a Party tool, or a Party literature. To
put it simply, Literature must become in an element of the democratic party labors.
• As a consequence, any type of literary experimentation or innovation was forbidden.
• Authors inside or abroad the soviet government and who had an affective position toward
communist ideas, intended to follow the Moscow line, Leninist perspective or vulgar
Marxism. As a consequence, literature and economy were considered elements in a closed
relationship, or cause and effect and writers were trapped in the intellectual limits of their
social-class position.
 ENGELSIAN-MARXIST CRITICISM

• Emerged from 1930 in the exile of some authors, under suppressed works or underground
form.
• These writers were denominated the Russian Formalist criticism, nevertheless their work is
not Marxist in all the sense of the work.
• The most main representatives of these authors are Victor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky,
and Boris Eichenbaum.
• Their main concepts about literary criticism involve the needing for close formal approach
of the literary work. Namely, they believed that the language of literature has its own and
specific procedures and effects, and is not just a version of ordinary language.
• .
• Shklovsky's concept of 'defamiliarisation' or 'making strange' (expounded in the essay
'Art as Technique', holds that one of the main effects of the language in literature is the
achievement of making the familiar world, to look as a world totally new for us.
• A world which we are seeing for the first time and therefore we can reevaluate.
• Shklovsky's Defamiliarization, therefore, makes a clear distinction between the reality and
the literary work verbal representation.
• As a consequence, the literary work is not conceived as a copy of the reality in a
documentary way.
 MARXIST CRITICISM LOUIS ALTHUSSER

•  The French theorist Louis Althusser (1918-1990) is one of the Marxist critic who has
exerted more influence in the contemporary Marxist literary thinking.
• His contribution is evident in a number key terms, notions and concepts that he has made
known.
• For instance: overdeterminism,repressive structures , relative autonomy, decentering,
ideological structures, etc.
• His Engelsian announcements, do not censure Marxist tendency to imprison art and
literature with economics. Nevertheless, it is intended to release literature in a high degree.
• Due to both: his innovative perspective and reformulation of the Marxist vision of literature,
Althusser could be considered a revisionist of Marxism.
 Main Althusser concepts
• Ideology:
Ideology is a system (possessing its logic and proper rigour) of representations (images,
myths, ideas or concepts according to the case) endowed with an existence and an historical role
at the heart of a given society.
• Decentring
• The notion of decentering implies that there is no overall unity: art has a relative autonomy
and is determined by the economic level only 'in the last instance‘
• Overdeterminism:
• , a word borrowed from Freud, which designates an effect which arises from a variety of
causes, that is, from several causes acting together, rather than from a single (in this case,
economic) factor.
Conti..
• Relative autonomy:
• which is the view that in spite of the connections between culture and economics, art has a degree of
independence from economic forces.
• repressive structures,
• Althusser makes a useful distinction between what we might call state power and state control. State
power is maintained by what Althusser terms repressive structures, which are institutions like the law
courts, prisons, the police force, and the army, which operate, in the last analysis, by external force.
• ideological structures or State ideological apparatuses
• These are such groupings as political parties, schools, the media, churches, the family, and art
(including literature) which foster an ideology - a set of ideas and attitudes - which is sympathetic to
the aims of the state and the political status quo.
WHAT MARXIST CRITICS DO? 

• They divide the literary work content in: overt (surface) and covert (hidden). Then they
make a relation between the hidden subject of the literary work with elemental Marxist
topics such as class struggle, clashes of large historical forces, conflicts between social
classes and so forth.
• They make a relation between the literary work context and the social-class status of the
writer, supposing (similar to psychoanalysts) that the author is not conscious of what he or
she is saying in the text.
• They also try to explain the fundamental qualities of a whole literary genre, based on the
main social issues of the époque in which the text was produced. For instance: they can state
that a novel is a the speaking of a certain social class, the tragedy is the way of expression of
the monarchy, whereas ballad speak for the working class.
Conti..
• Similarly, they make a relation between the text and the social conjectures of the time in
which it is consumed.
• 5. Marxist critics also tend to politicize the literary form. Namely, they state that the political
circumstances are the determiners of the distinct literary forms. For example: For some
critics, the sonnet formal and metrical form, is a counterpart of social stability, order and
good manners.
Thank you for
Your attention