The function of ideology is also to legitimate the power of the ruling class in society It is the way those class-relations are experienced, legitimized and perpetuated.  Men are not free to choose their social relations; they are constrained into them by material necessity.

Lucien Goldmann--trans-individual mental structures, homology
texts are not creations of individual genius; they are based upon "trans-individual mental structures" belonging to particular groups (0r classes).  These 'world-view' are perpetually being constructed and dissolved by social groups as they adjust their mental image of the world in response to the changing reality before them.
--great writers are able to crystallize world-views in a lucid and coherent form.

the expressive relationship between social class and literary  text was registered not in "reflected" content but in a parallelism of form, or "homology."

Marcherey--the unconscious of the text
the text as a production

The materials of a text ...are not 'free implements' to be used consciously to create a controlled and unified work of art.  Irrespective of prevailing aesthetic norms and authorial intentions, the text, in working the pre-given materials, is never fully 'aware of what it is doing'.  It has, so to speak, an 'unconscious.'

ideology--Once it is worked into a text, all its contradictions and gaps are exposed.  The realist writer intends to unify all the elements in the text, but the work that goes on in the textual process inevitably produces certain lapses and omissions which correspond to the incoherence of the ideological discourse it uses: 'for in order to say something, there are other things which must not be said."

It is by giving ideology a determinate form, fixing it within certain fictional limits, that art is able to distance itself from it, thus revealing to us the limits of that ideology.

Theorists on Ideology:

• Louis Althusser -- on Ideology; "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus"
• Gramsci -- Ideology & Hegemony
• Goldmann

-- great authors express the "world-views" of a particular group
-- homology between the structure of modern novel and the structure of modern economy
e.g. reification in modern novel

Althusser
social formation--instead of social system, order a de-centered structure
levels of contradiction which are overdetermined

• Macherey
  --the contradictions and flaws of an ideology "produced unconsciously" by the text
• Eagleton -- Criticism and Ideology; Materialist Criticism
• Jameson: (on ideology) / (dialectical criticism)

 

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

Post-Marxism: 

• Ernesto Laclau: "Politics and the Limits of Modernity" (Outline by Julia Kuo)

Capitalism:

liberal capitalism--imperialist capitalism--transnational capitalism
the importance of the individuals get diminished;
reification--the reduction of value to exchange value and the domination of human world by objects.
In the classical novel, objects only had significance in relation to individuals, but, in the novels of Sartre, Kafka and Robbe-Grillet, the world of objects begins to displace the individual. (Goldmann)

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