Marxism 3: Methodologies and Marxist Literary Theorists

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Marxism 3 Methodologies and Marxist Literary
Theorists

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Marxism Focuses

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

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Althusser and Gramsci Q A

• How does Althusser revise traditional marxism?
• How are Althusser and Gramsci similar to and
  different from each other in their views of
  ideology/hegemony? Which do you agree with more?
  
• How do they help us understand literature more?

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Methodologies Some Suggestions

• Class relations, economic determinism and the
  influences of (literary) relations of production
  in or of the texts
• Critique of Capitalist Society and Consumption
  Habits (e.g. overall commodification)
• Art and ideology contradictions within some
  ideologies or between ideologies and reality in a
  text or a group of texts.

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Methodologies Some Suggestions (2)

1. Class relations, economic determinism
2. Critique of Capitalist Society and Consumption
   Habits (e.g. overall commodification)
3. Art and ideology

• 1. Social Reflection vs. Pierre Machereys the
  Textual Unsaid
• 3. Ideology Eagletons Materialist Criticism
• 2. Jameson Three horizons of interpretation
• Their views on History

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Pierre Macherey the split text the textual
unsaid

• Reflectionism chap 5 p. 87 90-91)
• A text is as split as a Lacanian subject.
• Split between its overt (or intended) meaning and
  its unconscious or the hidden (and unintended)
  meaning caused by
• literary form (e.g. Prufrock as a Dramatic
  Monologue)
• contradictions in ideologies (e.g. T.S.
  Eliots)
• the material conditions of production in the
  society in which the text is produced and
  consumed. (Modernist Society)

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Pierre Macherey the textual unsaid/unconscious

• Is constructed in the moment of its entry into
  literary form.
• ? literary genre as a constraint
• the critics do not look for unity, but for
  the multiplicity and diversity of its possible
  meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which
  it displays but cannot describe, and above all
  its contradictions. (Belsey 109)

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the textual unsaid example 1

• Sherlock Holmes ????
• Its pattern enigma followed by disclosure (with
  total explicitness and scientific spirit) by the
  investigator.
• The stories are haunted by shadowy, mysterious
  and silent women.
• The women have to be kept in the dark, so that
  the ability to scientifically analyze and
  interpret the evidence is the mans.

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the textual unsaid example 2

• 1999 Notting hill -- cultural
  stereotypes(source http//www.scholars.nus.edu.sg
  /literature/althusserandmacherey.html ) Hugh
  Grant's repressed British mannerisms are
  contrasted to Julia Roberts' more laid-back
  American behaviour Grant as an underdoga mere
  second-hand bookstoore owner hoping to have a
  relationship with a movie star.

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the textual unsaidNotting hill

• Notting Hill, has a large population of Caribbean
  immigrants. Most Londoners would associate
  Notting Hill with its yearly carnival, a
  celebration of Black British culture.
• The film the only black -- an American movie
  producer. Race is an unconscious element of
  the movie, and at the same time "what it cannot
  say."
• ? the film subscribes to the ideology of
  Englishness.

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Pierre Macherey (for reference)

• We should question the work as to what it does
  not and cannot say, in those silences for which
  it has been made. The concealed order of the work
  is thus less significant than its real
  determinant disorder (its disarray). The order
  which it professes is merely an imagined order,
  projected onto disorder, the fictive resolution
  of ideological conflicts, a resolution so
  precarious that it is obvious in the very letter
  of the text where incoherence and incompleteness
  burst forth This distance which separates the
  work from the ideology which it transforms is
  rediscovered in the very letter of the work it
  is fissured, unmade even in its making. (Pierre
  Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production 115)

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Terry Eagletons Materialist Criticism

• General Ideology (GI)
• Authorial Ideology (AuI)
  Aesthetic Ideology (AI)
• Literary Mode of Production (LMP)
• General Mode of Production (GMP)

The Text
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Modes of production General and Literary

• General Mode of Production (GMP) and Literary
  Mode of Production (LMP)
• Every LMP is constituted by structure of
  production, distribution, exchange, and
  consumption (? Foucault and ? later)
• It's important to analyse the complex
  articulations of these various LMPs with the
  'general' mode of production of a social
  formation. For instance, how oral LMP can keep
  its traces in a written text.
• E.g. circulating library in the Victorian age,
  oral traces in novel and dramatic monologue
  traditional novel vs. hyper-fiction web page.

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General Ideology (GI), Authorial Ideology (AuI)
and Aesthetic Ideology (AI)

• GI is not an "ideal type of ideology in
  general," but the dominant ensemble of ideologies
  in social formation (54). (e.g. Modernist
  Ideology alienation, individualism, liberal
  humanism, elitism, etc. )
• AuI is the effect of the author's mode of
  biographical insertion into GI. (elitism ?
  Eliots emphasis on individual talents and
  tradition his critique of capitalist society
  his fear of woman)
• Aesthetic ideology
• (e.g. of dramatic monologue, stream of
  consciousness)

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T. S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock

• What is the poem about? How do you characterize
  Prufrock? What stages does he go through in
  this poem?
• Who is the you he talks to? And the we that
  drown?
• How does dramatic monologue help present the
  ideas of this poem? What ideologies does the
  poem criticize, support and/or embody?
• Eliots reading

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T. S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock

• Five parts (composes of fragments)
• 1. Decision Let us go then (other city
  room)
• 2. Procrastination And indeed there will be
  time. (room other they self
  questions/manners/dress)
• 3. Destination described, Self Doubted For I
  have known them all . . . (other formulas and
  ornaments self coffee spoons, butt-ends, not
  crab or prophet, etc.)
• 4. More Doubt And would it have been worth it.
  . .(self rituals, Lazarus, nerves other one
• 5. Self-Rejection No, I am not Prince Hamlet
  (self the Fool, we? other mermaid)

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock --dramatic
monologue

• A genre in which self-centeredness is both
  foregrounded and critiqued.
• But the self is usually coherent.
• Prufrock fragments of objects, rituals and
  questions, self-images.

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Reading (1) Prufrocks Self vs. Society

• Self-aware
• speaks to himself
• worries about his reputation (like the man from
  the inferno)
• of his appearance (prepare a face)
• Indecisive there will be time. (vs. To His
  Coy Mistress)
• Good-intentioned (with love)

• The city
• Sick and dirty, (evening, back street, sawdust
  restaurant, fog smoke,)
• 2. The polite society
• good-mannered, ritualistic (plate, toast, tea,
  etc.), but superficial and judgmental (the eyes
  that fix you).

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Reading (2) Prufrock Self-Pity vs. Self-Love

• 1. The city
• --working class invisible
• -- etherized evening
• 2. The Universe turned into a ball
• 3. The other mermaid something mythically
  remote and romantic. ? anticipate Eliots
  interest in classical culture.
• 4. The Lady unknown and inexpressive.

• Self-Centered projects his spiritual malaise on
  his physical environment
• John the Baptist Lazarus
• Self-Rejectionthe self he rejects is the social
  self, which is no different from the others in
  society

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T. S. Eliots authorial ideologies

• Son of an aristocratic St. Louis family
• His Aesthetic Ideology A poet must take as his
  material his own language as it is actually
  spoken around him. --Correlatively, the duty of
  the poet, as Eliot emphasized in a 1943 lecture,
  is only indirectly to the people his direct
  duty is to his language, first to preserve, and
  second to extend and improve.--Thus he
  dismisses the so-called social function of
  poetry.

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T. S. Eliot and Women (1) His Wife

• Vivien Haigh-Wood, the pretty but nervous English
  girl .
• She ended in madness, a development which in
  retrospect seems inevitable but for which Eliot
  felt partially responsible and for which he
  forgave himself only in old age, if ever.
• This burden is the biographical shadow behind a
  motif recurrent in the poems and plays--the motif
  of "doing a girl in," of wife murder. (Also,
  sense of alienation)
• Eliots struggle to cope emotionally and
  financially with Vivien Eliot's illness leads
  him first to exhaustion, and then, in 1921, to
  collapse.

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T. S. Eliot and Women (2) Possible gay tendency?

• Eliot on The Waste Land Various critics have
  done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms
  of criticism of the contemporary world, have
  considered it, indeed, as an important bit of
  social criticism. To me, it was only a personal
  and wholly insignificant grouse against life it
  is just a piece of rhythmic grumbling." ? "The
  Waste Land" as an elegy to a male lover, Jean
  Verdenal, who died in WWI and to whom Eliot
  dedicated Prufrock and Other Observations in
  1917. (Eliot qtd in Flanzbaum)
• New biography (2005)
• never consummated his marriage to Vivien only
  saw his wife once between 1932 and 1947.
• valued his friendships with men more than his
  relationships with women.
• Yet Eliot preferred his mother to his father and
  had an important friendship with Virginia Woolf.
  (Flanzbaum)

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Eagleton on Eliot

• Totality and Tradition Goes to Europe with a
  mission of re-defining the organic unity of its
  cultural traditions, and reinserting provincial
  England into that totality.
• The organic unity of late Romanticism
  classicism the surrender of personality to
  order, reason, authority and tradition.
• 2. A latent contradiction between Eliots
  concern for art as organic order and his
  insistence on the sensuously mimetic properties
  of poetic language. (e.g. Traditional and
  Individual Talent vs. Love Song)
• 3. The metaphysical poets as a solution.
• 4. The Waste Land Cultures collapse, but
  Culture survives, and its form is The Waste Land.

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Eliots views of culture and traditionculture as
religion (for reference)

• Culture - that which makes life worth living'
  one's total way of life, including art and
  education, but also cooking and sports.
• By tradition, also, Eliot means both a conscious
  and an unconscious life in a social continuum....
  He speaks of culture metaphorically as the
  incarnation' of a religion, the human
  manifestation of a superhuman reality. A
  culture's religion should mean for the
  individual and for the group something toward
  which they strive, not merely something which
  they possess. (Contemporary Authors Online,
  Gale, 2003. )

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Materialist Criticism on Prufrock

• (GI)-Fragmentation/Alienation of Selves
• (AuI)Tradition (fear of woman)
  (AI) Monologuists subjectivity/
• 
  
  Cubism/ love song
• (LMPLiterary Circle) The fact that these things
  occurred to the mind of Mr Eliot is surely of the
  very smallest importance to anyone, even to
  himself. They certainly have no relation to
  poetry" (1917)
• (GMP) Exploitation of Laborers (the unsaid) vs.
  Polite Society Prufrock-Littau (furniture
  wholesalers) vs. J. Afred

The Text
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Jamesons three horizons of criticism

• from immanent analysis to transcendent one
• 1. Structuralist analysis (e.g. binaries) a
  level of immanent analysis, text as a symbolic
  act
• 2. Ideology analysis a level of socio-discourse
  analysis, text as class discourse
• 3. an epochal level of Historical reading text
  as being embedded in a field of forces of the
  dynamic of various sign systems. (The textual
  heterogeneity can only be understood only as it
  relates to social and cultural heterogeneity
  outside the text.)

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Macherey on History

• the work is the writers response to a situation
  it is an answer to a problem/question he sets
  himself and he can be ideologically aware of
  what this question is. The real problem, however,
  is the question of that question the first
  question is already an answer to another question
  the first question (the one the writer might be
  aware of) is an ideologically conditioned
  question posed by the writers historical
  situation.

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Macherey on History

• work response to ideological question
• ideological
  response
• to
  history
• (the question behind the question).

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Eagleton on history

• Text Signifier Signification
• Signified
• IDEOLOGY
  Signifier
• 
  Signified
• 
  History
• The relation between text and ideology like that
  between theatric performance and a play.

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Jameson on History

• History as an absent cause
• "it History is inaccessible except through
  textual forms. and . . . our approach to it and
  to the Real itself necessarily passes through its
  prior textualization, its narrativization in the
  political unconscious." (33)

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References

• British Writers. Supplement 5. George Stade and
  Sarah Hannah Goldstein, editors. Charles
  Scribners Sons, 1999.
• Terry Eagleton Criticism and Ideology.
• Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (New York
  Methuen, 1980)
• Flanzbaum, Hilene.   Eliot's troubled
  sexuality.(T.S. Eliot The Making of an American
  Poet)(Book review). English Literature in
  Transition 1880-1920, Wntr 2007 v50 i1 p120(5)

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Next Week

• Another View on Society M. Foucault's Views on
  Discourse and Power (Reader chap 7 pp. 147-57)
• Girl Interrupted
• ("Faces of Madnessmaybe later or for reference)