Marxism 3: Methodologies and
Marxist Literary Theorists
Marxism: Focuses




Dialectic Materialism -- Marx and Vulgar
Marxism
Literature,Society & Ideology: Althusser and
Gramsci
Marxist Literary Theorists: Macherey,
Jameson and Eagleton
Foucault &文學社會學的多重互動模式
Althusser and Gramsci: Q & A
 How does Althusser revise traditional marxism?
 How are Althusser and Gramsci similar to and
different from each other in their views of
ideology/hegemony? Which do you agree with
more?
 How do they help us understand literature more?
Methodologies: Some Suggestions
 Class relations, economic determinism and the
influences of (literary) relations of production in
or of the texts
 Critique of Capitalist Society and Consumption
Habits (e.g. overall commodification)
 Art and ideology: contradictions within some
ideologies or between ideologies and reality in a
text or a group of texts.
Methodologies: Some Suggestions
(2)
Class relations,
economic
determinism
2. Critique of Capitalist
Society and
Consumption Habits
(e.g. overall
commodification)
3. Art and ideology
1.
1. Social Reflection vs. Pierre
Macherey’s the Textual
Unsaid
3. Ideology: Eagleton’s
Materialist Criticism
2. Jameson: Three horizons
of interpretation
 Their views on History
Pierre Macherey –
the split text; the textual unsaid
 Reflectionism chap 5: p. 87; 90-91)
 A text is as split as a Lacanian subject.
 Split between its overt (or intended) meaning and its
unconscious –or the hidden (and unintended)
meaning caused by
literary form; (e.g. Prufrock as a Dramatic Monologue)
contradictions in ideologies; (e.g. T.S. Eliot’s)
the material conditions of production in the society in
which the text is produced and consumed. (Modernist
Society)
Pierre Macherey –the textual
unsaid/unconscious
 Is constructed in the moment of its entry into
literary form.
 literary genre as a constraint
 the critics: do not look for “unity,” but for “the
multiplicity and diversity of its possible meanings,
its incompleteness, the omissions which it displays
but cannot describe, and above all its
contradictions.” (Belsey 109)
the textual unsaid— example 1
 Sherlock Holmes – 福爾摩斯
Its pattern: enigma followed by disclosure (with total
explicitness and scientific spirit) by the investigator.
The stories are “haunted by shadowy, mysterious
and silent women.”
The women have to be kept in the dark, so that
the ability to scientifically analyze and interpret
the evidence is the man’s.
the textual unsaid— example 2
 1999 : Notting hill -- cultural stereotypes(source:
http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/literature/althusserandmacherey.html )
Hugh Grant's repressed British mannerisms
are contrasted to Julia Roberts' more laid-back
American behaviour; Grant as an underdog—a
mere second-hand bookstoore owner hoping to
have a relationship with a movie star.
the textual unsaid—Notting hill
Notting Hill, has a large population of Caribbean
immigrants. Most Londoners would associate Notting
Hill with its yearly carnival, a celebration of Black British
culture.
 The film: the only black -- an American movie producer.
“Race is an ‘unconscious’ element of the movie, and at
the same time "what it cannot say."
  the film subscribes to the ideology of “Englishness.”

Pierre Macherey (for reference)

We should question the work as to what it does not and
cannot say, in those silences for which it has been made.
The concealed order of the work is thus less significant
than its real determinant disorder (its disarray). The order
which it professes is merely an imagined order, projected
onto disorder, the fictive resolution of ideological conflicts,
a resolution so precarious that it is obvious in the very
letter of the text where incoherence and incompleteness
burst forth […] This distance which separates the work
from the ideology which it transforms is rediscovered in
the very letter of the work: it is fissured, unmade even in
its making. (Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary
Production: 115)
Terry Eagleton’s Materialist
Criticism
General Ideology (GI)
Authorial Ideology (AuI)
The
Text
Aesthetic Ideology (AI)

Literary Mode of Production (LMP)

General Mode of Production (GMP)
Modes of production: General and
Literary

1.
2.
General Mode of Production (GMP) and Literary Mode of
Production (LMP)
Every LMP is constituted by structure of production,
distribution, exchange, and consumption“ ( Foucault
and 林 later)
It's important to analyse the complex articulations of
these various LMPs with the 'general' mode of production
of a social formation. For instance, how oral LMP can
keep its traces in a written text.

E.g. circulating library in the Victorian age, oral traces in novel
and dramatic monologue; traditional novel vs. hyper-fiction;
web ”page.”
General Ideology (GI), Authorial Ideology (AuI)
and Aesthetic Ideology (AI)
GI is not an "ideal type of ideology in general," but the
dominant ensemble of ideologies in social formation
(54). (e.g. Modernist Ideology: alienation, individualism,
liberal humanism, elitism, etc. )
 AuI is the effect of the author's mode of biographical
insertion into GI. (elitism  Eliot’s emphasis on
individual talents and tradition; his critique of capitalist
society; his fear of woman)
 Aesthetic ideology
(e.g. of dramatic monologue, stream of consciousness)

T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock”
What is the poem about? How do you characterize
Prufrock? What stages does he go through in this
poem?
 Who is the “you” he talks to? And the “we” that drown?
 How does dramatic monologue help present the ideas
of this poem? What ideologies does the poem criticize,
support and/or embody?
Eliot’s reading

T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock”
Five parts (composes of fragments):
 1. Decision: “Let us go then”; (other: city; [room])
 2. Procrastination: “And indeed there will be time.”
([room]; other: they; self: questions/manners/dress)
 3. Destination described, Self Doubted: “For I have
known them all . . . “ (other: formulas and ornaments;
self: coffee spoons, butt-ends, not crab or prophet, etc.)
 4. More Doubt: “And would it have been worth
it. . .”(self: rituals, Lazarus, nerves; other: “one”
 5. Self-Rejection: “No, I am not Prince Hamlet” (self:
the Fool, “we?”; other: mermaid)
“The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” --dramatic monologue
A genre in which self-centeredness is both
foregrounded and critiqued.
But the self is usually coherent.
Prufrock: fragments of objects, rituals and
questions, self-images.
Reading (1) – Prufrock’s Self vs. Society



Self-aware
speaks to himself;
worries about his
reputation (like the man
from the inferno)
of his appearance;
(prepare a face)
Indecisive: “there will be
time.” (vs. “To His Coy
Mistress)
Good-intentioned (with love)
The city:
 Sick and dirty, (evening, back
street, sawdust restaurant,
fog & smoke,)
2. The polite society

good-mannered, ritualistic
(plate, toast, tea, etc.), but
superficial and judgmental
(the eyes that fix you).
1.
Reading (2) Prufrock: Self-Pity vs. Self-Love

Self-Centered; projects his
spiritual malaise on his
physical environment
 John the Baptist; Lazarus

Self-Rejection—the self he
rejects is the “social self,”
which is no different from the
others in society
1. The city:
--working class invisible;
-- etherized evening;
2. The Universe turned into a
ball;
3. The other –mermaid;
something mythically
remote and romantic. 
anticipate Eliot’s interest in
classical culture.
4. The Lady– unknown and
inexpressive.
T. S. Eliot’s authorial ideologies
Son of an aristocratic St. Louis family
 His Aesthetic Ideology: A poet must
take as his material his own language
as it is actually spoken around him.”
--Correlatively, the duty of the poet, as
Eliot emphasized in a 1943 lecture, ”is
only indirectly to the people: his direct
duty is to his language, first to
preserve, and second to extend and
improve.”
--Thus he dismisses the socalled ”social function” of poetry.

T. S. Eliot and Women (1): His Wife
Vivien Haigh-Wood, the pretty but nervous English girl .
 She ended in madness, a development which in
retrospect seems inevitable but for which Eliot felt
partially responsible and for which he forgave himself
only in old age, if ever.
 This burden is the biographical shadow behind a motif
recurrent in the poems and plays--the motif of "doing a
girl in," of wife murder. (Also, sense of alienation)
 Eliot’s struggle to cope emotionally and financially with
Vivien Eliot's illness …[leads] him first to exhaustion, and
then, in 1921, to collapse.

T. S. Eliot and Women (2): Possible
gay tendency?


Eliot on “The Waste Land” “[V]arious critics have done me the
honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the
contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important
bit of social criticism. To me, it was only a personal and wholly
insignificant grouse against life: it is just a piece of rhythmic
grumbling."  "The Waste Land" as an elegy to a male lover,
Jean Verdenal, who died in WWI and to whom Eliot dedicated
Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. (Eliot qtd in Flanzbaum)
New biography (2005):
never consummated his marriage to Vivien; only saw his wife
once between 1932 and 1947.
valued his friendships with men more than his relationships
with women.
Yet Eliot preferred his mother to his father and had an important
friendship with Virginia Woolf.” (Flanzbaum)
Eagleton on Eliot
1.
Totality and Tradition: Goes to Europe with a mission
of re-defining the organic unity of its cultural traditions,
and reinserting provincial England into that totality.
The organic unity of late Romanticism + classicism; “the
surrender of ‘personality’ to order, reason, authority and
tradition.”
2. A latent contradiction: between Eliot’s concern for art as
organic order and his insistence on the sensuously mimetic
properties of poetic language. (e.g. “Traditional and
Individual Talent” vs. “Love Song)
3. The metaphysical poets as a solution.
4. “The Waste Land” – Cultures collapse, but Culture
survives, and its form is The Waste Land.
Eliot’s views of culture and tradition–
culture as religion (for reference)
Culture - `that which makes life worth living': one's total
way of life, including art and education, but also cooking
and sports.
 By tradition, also, Eliot means both a conscious and an
unconscious life in a social continuum.... He speaks of
culture metaphorically as the `incarnation' of a religion,
the human manifestation of a superhuman reality. A
culture's religion `should mean for the individual and for
the group something toward which they strive, not
merely something which they possess.‘ (Contemporary
Authors Online, Gale, 2003. )

Materialist Criticism on “Prufrock”
(GI)-Fragmentation/Alienation of “Selves”
(AuI):Tradition (fear of woman)

The
Text
(AI): Monologuist’s subjectivity/
Cubism/ “love song”
(LMP—Literary Circle): The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr
Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly
have no relation to poetry…" (1917)

(GMP): Exploitation of Laborers (the unsaid) vs. Polite Society;
Prufrock-Littau (furniture wholesalers) vs. J. Afred
Jameson’s three horizons of
criticism
from immanent analysis to transcendent one
1. Structuralist analysis (e.g. binaries): a level of immanent
analysis, = text as a symbolic act
2. Ideology analysis: a level of socio-discourse analysis, =
text as class discourse
3. an epochal level of Historical reading = text as being
embedded in a field of forces of the dynamic of various
sign systems. (The textual heterogeneity can only be
understood only as it relates to social and cultural
heterogeneity outside the text.)

Macherey on History

the work is the writer’s response to a situation — it is
an answer to a problem/question he sets himself —
and he can be ideologically aware of what this question
is. The real problem, however, is the question of that
question — the first question is already an answer to
another question — the first question (the one the
writer might be aware of) is an ideologically conditioned
question posed by the writer’s historical situation.
Macherey on History
work = response to ideological question
ideological response
to history
(the question behind the question).
Eagleton on history
 Text
Signifier Signification
Signified
IDEOLOGY
Signifier
Signified
History
The relation between text and ideology: like that
between theatric performance and a play.
Jameson on History
 History as an absent cause:
 "it [History] is inaccessible except through textual
forms. and . . . our approach to it and to the Real
itself necessarily passes through its prior
textualization, its narrativization in the political
unconscious." (33)
References
British Writers. Supplement 5. George Stade and Sarah
Hannah Goldstein, editors. Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1999.
 Terry Eagleton Criticism and Ideology.
 Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (New York: Methuen,
1980)
 Flanzbaum, Hilene. ”Eliot's troubled sexuality.(T.S.
Eliot: The Making of an American Poet)(Book review).”
English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Wntr 2007
v50 i1 p120(5)

Next Week
 Another View on Society: M. Foucault's Views on
Discourse and Power (Reader: chap 7: pp. 14757)
 Girl Interrupted
("Faces of Madness“—maybe later or for
reference)