marxist criticism & fredric jameson

7/29/2019 Marxist Criticism �& Fredric Jameson

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Marxist Criticism

& Fredric Jameson“不能没有马克思，没有马克思，没有对马克思的记忆，没有马克思的遗产，也就没有将来；无论如何得有某个马克思，得有他的才华，至少得有他的某

种精神。” ——德里达：《马克

思的幽灵》

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Karl_Marx_001.jpg



Part 1 Marxist Criticism

1.The division of Marxism

1.1 classical Marxism

1.2 early Western Marxism

1.3 late Marxism

Note: It is to be noted that this division, though

chronological in nature, by no means indicates the

later period was to replace the former. They in factco-exist with a complex inter-connection in

between.



1.1 classical Marxism

The classical Marxist criticism flourished chiefly in a period from Marx andEngels to the Second World War. It characterizes itself by an insistence on atleast the following basic tenets: materialism, economic determinism, classstruggle, surplus value, reification, proletarian revolution and communism.Marx and Engels were political philosophers rather than literary critics, but thescant and fragmentary aesthetic comments they had made enabled people after

them to build a theory out of them. Marx, for instance, made the famous“ideology critique” in The Holy Family on Eugène Sue’s novel The Mysteriesof Paris, and he also mentioned the concept of ideology in The German

Ideology. Half a century later Engels elaborated the concept in his letter toFranz Mehring. All this provides a rich resource for an ideological criticism.Marx and Engels were more concerned with the contents rather than the formof the literature, because to them literary study was more politically orientedand content was much more ideologically charged. Literary form, however,did have a place if it served their political purposes. Marx and Engels, for instance, liked the realism in C. Dickens, H. Balzac, and W.M. Thackeray, andLenin praised L. Tolstoy for the “political and social truths” in his novels.



1.2 Early Western Marxism Georg Lukács , perhaps the first Western Marxist. He

denounced, as reductionistic and mechanistic the“vulgar” Marxist version of criticism whereby thefeatures of a cultural text were strictly determined by or interpreted in terms of the economic and social

conditions of its production and by the class status of itsauthor. However, he insisted, more than anybody else,on the traditional Marxist reflectionist theory, evenwhen this theory was under severe attack from theformalists in the fifties. In Art and Objective Truth

(1954), he criticized two fallacies of mimesis, namely,false objectivism for its mechanistic materialism andfalse subjectivism for its idealism. The typical exampleof the former is literary naturalism, while for the latter itis the subject-oriented criticism.



1.2 Early Western Marxism

Mikhail M. Bakhtin

1.2.1 In “Discourse in the Novel” written in the thirtieth,Bakhtin, like Lukács, tried to define the novel as aliterary from in terms of Marxism. The discourse of thenovel , unlike that of poetry which is monological, ischaracterized by its dialogic orientation .

1.2.2 The “dialogized heteroglossia” of the novel isideological in nature, in that sense that the polyphonicvoices represent different social forces contendingwith each other.

1.2.3 “Laughter and Freedom” offers a case of such aheteroglossia of contradictions. Here laughter in theCarnival represents “the voice of the people” in theMiddle Ages as a contending force against theempowered “monolithically serious ecclesiastical,

political establishment.”



1.2 early Western Marxism

Frankfurt School of Marxism

In 1923,“Institute of Social Research” founded in

University of Frankfurt, Germany

Members:Max Hirkheimer, Thoedor Adorno,

Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm and Herbert

Marcuse, Louis Althussser, Williams ,etc.

A distinctive feature of the Frankfurt School areindependence, interdisciplinarity



1.3 late Marxism

Williams: there were at least three forms of

Marxism: the writings of Karl Marx, the

systems developed by later Marxists out of

these writings, and Marxisms popular at givenhistorical moments.

Fredric Jameson: there were two Marxisms,

one being the Marxian System developed by

Karl Marx himself, and the other being its later development of various kind



Part 2 Fredric Jameson

Fredric R. Jameson (born in 1934 inCleveland, Ohio) is one of today'smost important and most influentialcultural theorists. He has done more

for the contextual study of culturethan any other living scholar. Over the past four decades, he hasdeveloped a richly nuanced theory of how modern culture - in particular,

literature, painting, cinema, andarchitecture - relates to social andeconomic developments.



Publications of F. Jameson: Books

F. Jameson. The Modernist Papers. Verso, 2007.

Jameson on Jameson. edited by I. Buchanan Duke University Press, 2007.

F. Jameson. A Singular Modernity . Verso Press, 2002. The Cultural Turn. London: Verso Press, 1998.

Brecht and Method . London: Verso Press, 1998.

Seeds of Time. Columbia University Press, 1994.

Theory of Culture. Rikkyo University, 1994. (Lectures at Rikkyo University)

The Geopolitical Aesthetic, or, Cinema and Space in the World System. Inidiana University Pressand BFI Publishsing, 1992.

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990.

Signatures of the Visible. Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc., 1990.

Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic . London: Verso Press, 1990.

F. Jameson. The Ideology of Theory, Essays 1971-1986 . Vol. 1 Situations of Theory, Vol. 2 TheSyntax of History University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

F. Jameson. Postmodernism & Cultural Theories. 1987. (Houxiandaizhuyi he Wenhualilun (Lecturesin China) (Xi'an: Shanxi Teacher's University) Reprinted in journals in Taiwan & Hong Kong 1988Reprinted in Taiwan with new preface by Tang Xiaobing 1989)

F. Jameson. The Political Unconscious. Cornell University Press, 1981.

F. Jameson. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist . University of California Press, 1979.

F. Jameson. The Prison-House of Language. Princeton University Press, 1972. (Reprinted inJapanese 1989 Reprinted in Korean 1989)

F. Jameson. Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. PrincetonUniversity Press, 1971.

F. Jameson. Sartre: The Origins of a Style. Yale University Press, 1961. (Reissued 1984 (ColumbiaUniversity Press))



Jameson restored to literary study the historical

responsibility by re-emphasizing the reflective and

transformative functions of literature at a time in

Western history when these functions were badlyneeded. Meanwhile he discredited the traditional

Marxist generic approach to literature, because

post-industrial capitalism had to a large extent

destroyed man’s sense of history so that it wasdifficult to experience historical reality as an

integrated unity.



The Political Unconscious, the most important work for the earlyJameson perhaps, forcefully reveals that every reading andinterpretation is inevitably political and ideological. HereJameson rewrites the Marxian concept of “ideology” into that of

“ideologeme”, the smallest semantic unit in the dialogues amongcontending social classes (Jameson 1981:76). By focusing on thecritical evaluation of one class on another, Jameson drawsMarxism from actual reality to textual analysis. This“textualization of history” is better seen in “meta-commentary”,

the most important Jamesonian concept in his thirty years of Marxist theoretical praxis. It suggests “not a head-on, directsolution or resolution, but a commentary on the every conditionof the problem itself”



Conclusion

It is to be noted that at every historical moment when Marxismseemed in trouble, Marxist criticism would gain a newdevelopment. The early 1920s saw the heyday of “anthropological” Marxism; 1930s witnessed a strong leftist

literary criticism in the West; and Mc-Carthyism went hand inhand with the strengthening of Western Marxism. Marxism isonce again severely challenged in the last years of the twentiethcentury beginning with the ice age of Reagan-Thatcherism, and itwill never be the “true but superfluous,” simply because

Marxism provides the best analysis on the contradictions of capitalism, “to the ways that it can not help producing wealth and

poverty at a stroke, as material conditions of one another”(Eagleton & Milne 1996:6).



Questions for discussion

1.What’s your comment on Marxist criticism

in China nowadays?

2.有人认为，马克思主义的文艺批评在当下

整个文学批评中的领域中处于夹缝状态，你是否同意这一看法？为什么？



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marxist criticism & fredric jameson

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