Slides of marxism 1
- 2. Marxist saw a direct cause-effect relationship between the socio-economic base and literature and saw the writer as conditioned by his or her social class. Social dimension is absolutely indispensable. Social reality of the writer will always be part of the text. The reliability of literary texts as social ‘evidence’.
- 3. Meanings of the text must be seen as independent of the political views of its author. The work of art must ‘reflect correctly and in proper proportion all important factors objectively determining the area of life it represents and reflect these that this area of life becomes comprehensible from within and without , re-experienceable’.
- 4. Critics influenced by Althusser and his grim view of an enormously powerful ideology, texts do not so easily allow us a view of an undistorted reality. Ideology is a strong presence in the text Focus on what the text does not say, on what the text repress rather than express.
- 5. Macherey finds the cracks in the text’s façade In literary text’s the work of ideology is never fully successful, we will find ‘the inscription of an otherness in the work’. Literary criticism brings out the difference within the work by demonstrating that it is other than it is.
- 6. Bakhtin argues that novel as a genre is inherently plural; it always presents a plurality of voices. The presence of a variety of characters who all articulate themselves in different ways is a ‘mere diversity of voices. A natural language is not a seamless unity but a compound of large number of languages: social dialects, characteristic group behavior , professional jargons, generic language, language of generation, … language of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions”.
- 7. Different socio-ideological position of the author and the heteroglossia of the epoch Unlike the poetry in which he sees unity of style, the novel is hybrid. Whatever the intentions of their authors, novels are arenas, sites where diverse and often competing discourses and ideologies live together in a not necessarily peaceful existence.
- 8. Language itself -every word, every phrase- comes laden with a history that testifies to this. It is a work of art whose creation ‘demands enormous effort: it is stylized through and through, thoroughly premeditated, achieved’