Chapter 8: Marxist criticism

By King Meera -

  • desire to emphasize difference between art and propaganda
  • a writer's social class and its prevailing ideology (outlook, values, tacit assumptions, half-realized allegiances etc) have a major bearing on what is written by him as a member of that class w.r.t. content, obviously, but also form
  • deals with history in a generalized way - speaks of conflict within classes and clashes of large historical forces, but rarely discusses the detail of a specific historical situation or relates it closely to the interpretation of a particular historical text
Leninist Marxist criticism:
  • 1930s - reaction throughout Soviet society; State began to exert direct control over literature and he arts as well as everything else
  • influenced by Lenin's argument that "Literature must become Party literature ... Literature must become part of the organized, methodical, and unified labors of the social democratic party>
  • Soviet Writers' Congress (1934) outlawed liberal views; new Lenin-based orthodoxy imposed
  • experimentation effectively banned; straight realism (socialist realism) imposed
  • the international influence of Leninist views was due to the preference of those abroad who were sympathetic to the ideas of communism to stick to official party policy wherever it existed
  • 'Vulgar Marxism' assumed a direct cause-effect relationship between literature and economics, with all writers seen as irrevocably trapped within the intellectual limits of their social class position
  • Christopher Caudwell: rigid Marxist literary criticism - generalized (very little detailed textual reference to the works under discussion) and specific (w.r.t. every facet of a writer being linked to some aspect of his/her social status) (like when he suggests that a particular kind of vocabulary is the direct product of the middle-class writer's evasiveness on sensitive social issues)

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