Marxist Criticism: Major Concepts

A. Marxism: 

   --Traditional Marxism & sociology of literature: 

    -- Hegel's Aesthetics

B. Western Marxism, Frankfurt School:

    --Lukacs on Realism, Adorno on negativity; Adorno and Iser, Benjamin-Adorno debate

C. Art and Ideology: to understand the complex, indirect relations between those works and the ideological worlds they inhabit;

1. Theorists on Ideology

   --Althusser; Gramsci; Eagleton on Ideology; Eagleton's Materialist Marxism

2. Marxist Feminism

Shulamith Firestone  The Dialectic of Sex
substitute sex for class as the prime historical determinant, and to present the 'class struggle' as itself a product of the organization of the biological family unit.

Michel Barret--the articulation of patriarchy and capitalism--
several factors need to be considered:
the economic organization of households, its accompanying 'familial ideology'; the division of labor in the economic system; the systems of education and the state; the cultural processes in which men and women are differently represented; the nature of gender identity and the relationship between sexuality and biological reproduction.
1. she agrees with Woolf's materialist argument
2. the ideology of gender affects the way the writings of men and women are read

e.g. working-class women --double oppression of the sexual division of labor at work and in the home

D. Jameson's three-horizon criticism

E. Cultural critique (critique of contemporary capitalist society and its culture)--Jameson on postmodernism

F. Post-Marxism 

  --Ernesto Laclau: "Politics and the Limits of Modernity"

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