Prepared by: Monica San Juan

• Begin in the 19th century as a pragmatic view of

history that offered the working classes of society

an opportunity to change their world

• It offered humanity a social, political, economic,

and cultural understanding of the nature of

reality, society and the individual.

• Root of Marxist literary

theory

• Born in Tier, Germany in

1818

• His writings became the

basis of Marxism

Approach.

• Died on 14 March 1883

Marxism

Our place in the society determine our consciousness

study the relationship between

a text and the society that reads it.

focuses on class relations

and societal conflict

People’s experiences are responsible for shaping and

developing an individual personal’s

consciousness

Works of

Marx

German Ideology

Das CapitalThe

Communist Manifesto

• Marx declares that “consciousness does not

determine life: life determines consciousness.”

• Humans define themselves.

• He said that our ideas and concepts about

ourselves fashioned in everyday discourse in the

language of real life.

• Core belief of Marxism

• Marx believed that society had progressed from one

economic system to another

• As society progresses from a feudal system to a more

market-based economy, the actual process from

producing, distributing, and consuming goods becomes

more complex

• People’s functions within the economic system become

differentiated.

1. Base

Engenders and controls all human institutions and

ideologies

2. Superstructure

All social and legal institutions, political and

educational systems, religions, and art

Feudalism

(Social System)

Capitalism

(Production for profit)

Socialism

(Social Ownership)

Communism

(Society’s ultimate goal “the worker’s paradise”)

Proletariat

• class of society which

does not have ownership

of the means of

production.

Bourgeoisie

• wealthy class that rules

society.

• States that the history of all existing societies is

the history of class struggle

• They declare that the capitalists, or the

bourgeoisie, had successfully enslaved the

working class, or the proletariat through

economic policies and production of goods.

• History became the basis for 20th century

Marxism, socialism, and communism

• History, an understanding of people and their

actions and beliefs is determined by economic

conditions.

• Marx maintains that an intricate web of social

relationships emerges when any group of people

engage in the production of goods.

• The ideology of a society such as the

beliefs, values and culture is determined

by the upper class.

• The rich become richer, while the poor

become poorer

Proponents and their contributions

• G. K. Plehanov – Translated “The Communist

Manifesto”

• Russia – first country to promote Marxist

principles

• Leon Trotsky – became the founding father of

Marxist literary criticism as he authored

Literature and Revolution (1925)

• Believed that a detailed analysis of symbols, images and

other literary devices (formalism) would expose class

conflict and expose the relationship between the

superstructure and the base

• Reflectionism

Approach to literary analysis declaring that texts

directly reflect a society's consciousness

Emphasizing negative effects of capitalism such as

alienation

• Neo-Marxist group devoted to developing western

Marxist principles

• A text reveals a culture’s fragmentation and not its

wholeness

• He said that there is a complex relationship

between the base and the superstructure

• The bourgeoisie establish and maintain what he

calls hegemony

• As sustainers of the economic base, the

dominant class thus enjoys the prestige of the

masses and controls the ideology that shapes

individual consciousness

• Literature actually concerns itself with the

bourgeoisie

• Production Theory

The superstructure can and does influence the base

• Althusser believes that the prevailing ideology

forms the attitudes of people in society through a

process he calls interpellation or “hailing the

subject.”

• The people’s worldview is thus craftily shaped by

a complex network of messages sent to them

through the elements contained in the

superstructure, including the arts.

• Fredric Jameson believes that the function of

literary analysis is to uncover the political

unconscious present in a text.

He said that all critics must be aware of their own

ideology when analyzing a text and must therefore

possess dialectical self-awareness.

• Terry Eagleton

Believes that literature is neither a product of pure

inspiration nor the product of the author's feelings.

Literature is a product of an ideology. This ideology is a

result of the social interactions that occur between

people in definite times and locations.

The critic’s task is to reconstruct an author’s ideology.

• Marxism is not primarily a literary theory that can

be used to interpret a text.

• It is a set of social, economic, and political ideas

that its followers believe will enable them to

interpret and more importantly, change the world.

• Marxism is material, not spiritual.

• All of our actions and responses to such

activities are related in some way to our culture.

• In order to understand ourselves and our world,

we must first acknowledge the interrelatedness

of all our actions within the society.

• It is our cultural and our social circumstances

that determine who we are.

• The structure of our society is built on a series of

ongoing conflicts between social classes.

• Capitalists control the society’s ideology or social

consciousness (hegemony)

• The focus of literature is the relationship of a

society’s superstructure to other elements and to

the base.

• Marxism addresses the cry of working class

Marxism

Class Struggle

Ideology expressed by author

Bourgeoisie vs.

Proletariat

• Concerns for the working classes and the

individual

• Recognizing the interrelatedness of all human

activities

• Deals with more than the conventional literary

themes, matters of style, plot, characterization

and the usual emphasis on figures of speech and

other literary devices

1. Author’s life

2. Time/period in which the text was written

3. Cultural milieu

4. Ideology expressed by the author

• Expressed by the author, as evidenced through

his or her fictional world, and how this ideology

interacts with the reader’s personal ideology.

• Expose class conflict with the dominant class

and its ideology being imposed

• The task of the critic is to uncover the ideology

and show how such a destructive ideology

entraps the working classes and oppresses them

in every area of their lives.

• A critic may begin by showing how an author’s

text reflects his or her ideology through an

examination of the fictional world’s characters.

Setting, society, or any other aspect of the text.

• It could also be by examining the history and the

culture of the times reflected in the text

1. Is there an outright rejection of socialism in the

work?

2. Does the text raise fundamental criticism about

the emptiness of life in bourgeois society?

3. In portraying society, what approximation of

totality does the author achieve? What is

emphasized? What is ignored?

4. How well is the fate of the individual linked

organically to the nature of societal forces?

What are the work’s conflicting forces?

5. At what points are actions or solutions to

problems forced or unreal?

6. Are characters from all social levels equally well

sketched?

7. What are the values of each class in the work?

8. What is valued most? Sacrifice? Assent?

Resistance?

9. How clearly do narratives of disillusionment and

defeat indicate that bourgeoisie values

(competition, acquisitiveness, chauvism) are

incompatible with human happiness?

10.Does the protagonist defend or defect from the

dominant values of society? Are those values in

ascendancy or decay?