Transcript Marxist Criticism & Fredric Jameson

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》
Part 1 Marxist Criticism
 1.The division of Marxism
 1.1 classical Marxism
 1.2 early Western Marxism
 1.3 late Marxism
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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 fact
co-exist with a complex inter-connection in
between.
1.1 classical Marxism
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The classical Marxist criticism flourished chiefly in a period from Marx and
Engels to the Second World War. It characterizes itself by an insistence on at
least the following basic tenets: materialism, economic determinism, class
struggle, surplus value, reification, proletarian revolution and communism.
Marx and Engels were political philosophers rather than literary critics, but the
scant 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 Mysteries
of Paris, and he also mentioned the concept of ideology in The German
Ideology. Half a century later Engels elaborated the concept in his letter to
Franz Mehring. All this provides a rich resource for an ideological criticism.
Marx and Engels were more concerned with the contents rather than the form
of the literature, because to them literary study was more politically oriented
and 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, and
Lenin 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 the
features 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 its
author. However, he insisted, more than anybody else,
on the traditional Marxist reflectionist theory, even
when this theory was under severe attack from the
formalists in the fifties. In Art and Objective Truth
(1954), he criticized two fallacies of mimesis, namely,
false objectivism for its mechanistic materialism and
false subjectivism for its idealism. The typical example
of the former is literary naturalism, while for the latter it
is 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 a
literary from in terms of Marxism. The discourse of the
novel , unlike that of poetry which is monological, is
characterized by its dialogic orientation .
 1.2.2 The “dialogized heteroglossia” of the novel is
ideological in nature, in that sense that the polyphonic
voices represent different social forces contending
with each other.
 1.2.3 “Laughter and Freedom” offers a case of such a
heteroglossia of contradictions. Here laughter in the
Carnival represents “the voice of the people” in the
Middle Ages as a contending force against the
empowered “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 are
independence, 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 given
historical 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 in
Cleveland, Ohio) is one of today's
most important and most influential
cultural theorists. He has done more
for the contextual study of culture
than any other living scholar. Over the
past four decades, he has developed a
richly nuanced theory of how modern
culture - in particular, literature,
painting, cinema, and architecture relates to social and economic
developments.
Publications of F. Jameson: Books
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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 Press
and 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 The
Syntax of History University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
F. Jameson. Postmodernism & Cultural Theories. 1987. (Houxiandaizhuyi he Wenhualilun (Lectures in
China) (Xi'an: Shanxi Teacher's University) Reprinted in journals in Taiwan & Hong Kong 1988
Reprinted 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 in
Japanese 1989 Reprinted in Korean 1989)
F. Jameson. Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton
University Press, 1971.
F. Jameson. Sartre: The Origins of a Style. Yale University Press, 1961. (Reissued 1984 (Columbia
University 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 badly
needed. 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 was
difficult to experience historical reality as an
integrated unity.
 The Political Unconscious, the most important work for the early
Jameson perhaps, forcefully reveals that every reading and
interpretation is inevitably political and ideological. Here
Jameson rewrites the Marxian concept of “ideology” into that of
“ideologeme”, the smallest semantic unit in the dialogues among
contending social classes (Jameson 1981:76). By focusing on the
critical evaluation of one class on another, Jameson draws
Marxism 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, direct
solution or resolution, but a commentary on the every condition
of the problem itself”
Conclusion
 It is to be noted that at every historical moment when Marxism
seemed in trouble, Marxist criticism would gain a new
development. The early 1920s saw the heyday of
“anthropological” Marxism; 1930s witnessed a strong leftist
literary criticism in the West; and Mc-Carthyism went hand in
hand with the strengthening of Western Marxism. Marxism is
once again severely challenged in the last years of the twentieth
century beginning with the ice age of Reagan-Thatcherism, and it
will 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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The end