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----- Original Message ----- From: zend...@aol.com To: jgram...@gmail.com Cc: r...@googlegroups.com ; geraldjme...@aol.com Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2012 1:21 PM Subject: Re: [S&D] extracts from Annette Rubinstein article [identical attachment] Fundamental Problems in Marxist Literary Criticism: Form, History and Ideology Annette T. Rubinstein [Introductory and concluding passages from article published in Socialism and Democracy, no. 21, Spring 1997] What has generally been called marxist literary criticism in the United States.is, with rare exceptions, actually sociological rather than marxist. That is, it is concerned only with the raw material, the manifest content, of a novel, play or poem, and with the author's attitude towards these facts. This misrepresentation is related to the popular stereotype of marxism as simple economism. Unfortunately it is not entirely the fault of unfriendly outsiders. All too often communists themselves, in their opposition to formalism, have proclaimed or implied indifference to formal literary values. Despite recent theoretical developments these images of marxism —rooted in the 1930s and before—remain with us. It therefore makes sense to revisit some of the formative figures of the tradition to see how their understanding of certain key problems can ground the present discussions of literature and of criticism. In the early thirties, when almost the only approach most New York literary circles took seriously was either that of the "New Critics" or that of the communists, Mike Gold's attack on Thornton Wilder's "Genteel Christ" preoccupied three full issues of The New Republic. But Gold's polemic dealt only with Wilder's subject matter and personal values. In The New Masses, first edited by Gold, the prolonged debate on the nature of proletarian literature, which he initiated, continued long after his two years in office. Still there were really no issues raised as to formal criteria. The questions argued were whether proletarian literature meant literature about proletarian life, literature written by proletarians, or simply literature which took the side of the proletariat in the class war. Of course the critical practice of the debaters in discussing individual works was often much better than their theorizing, and their creative achievements were, as Alan Wald and others are now showing, among the most valuable of their time. But I am here speaking only of their conscious aesthetic. This simplistic approach is all the more surprising in that both Marx and Engels attributed such enormous importance to the specific form of economic exploitation as it varied from slavery through serfdom to wage labor. They both stressed the extraordinary effect on all human relations and social institutions when exploitation took the disguised form of commodity production, and envisioned another upheaval only when the capitalist forces of production became incompatible with the form. Emphasis on the historical specificity of a given form applies as well to the matter of literary production. No doubt, attention to formal values is characteristic of all good literary criticism. There is no claim that it is peculiar to marxism. But since few students in the United States today have any idea that marxist critics are, and always have been, seriously concerned with literary form as well as content it is worth taking time to provide some illustrations from the formative years of our practice. As with all original thinkers, there are often differences between individual marxists as well as between marxist and catholic or freudian critics. I will therefore make the obvious explicit by stating directly the general assumptions which all marxists accept. We believe there is an external world, which exists independent of our beliefs, and that our representations of it can, more or less accurately, refer to and describe this world, including our reactions to it. We believe that it is a natural world with no supernatural powers in control, and that we ourselves are part of it with a real biological and social history relating us to, and in some respects distinguishing us from, other living things. We believe that people as they now exist are social beings with needs, capacities, emotions and ideas formed through thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of group life, and that our imaginative ability to create and enjoy aesthetic experiences is an important part of our being. We also believe that while men and women generally act so as to serve, or in ways that they think will serve, their individual interests this is by no means true of all of them at all times. Human beings, like dogs and cats and birds and many other species, will often deliberately sacrifice their individual well-being or even their lives for the benefit of others. Men and women may also do so in support of an idea or an ideology. In the following pages we will be dealing with the treatment of three central literary problems by a number of very diverse marxist critics, drawn predominantly from the classic works of the twenties and thirties, since these have come to inform later discussions. It is our conviction that without this historical grounding, contemporary debates, whatever their merits, would lack sufficient context to evaluate the larger significance of critical endeavors. The problems are: 1) the relation of form to content, 2) the relation of literature to history, 3) the relation of an author's ideology to his or her creative work. […] […] [concluding paragraphs:] The good critic, whatever his or her orientation, must first of all be a good reader interested in, sensitive to, and respectful of, the writer's work. There may be levels of meaning of which the writer was not fully aware, and appreciative criticism may well make those accessible to readers and even to the writer himself or herself, but one should not treat creation as automatic writing. A novel is a work, not a dream. Brecht did not patronizingly assume Moliere to be ignorant of the context in which his miser showed absurd as well as greedy; Kettle did not suppose Hardy indifferent to the historical development he mourned but could not propositionally present. A good marxist critic will use his own materialist understanding of history and his consciousness of social forces to make more fully apparent the significance of a work and the art of its creator, not to substitute for them. This is true whether or not the writers have fully accomplished the task they set themselves. As in Leo Marx's analysis of Huckleberry Finn, the discussion of a partial failure may also enhance our appreciation of an intention not fully realized and deepen our understanding of the artist and his world. And that is, finally, the critic's essential function. Marxist literary criticism adds an attention to the relation between the inner world of the work and that which lies beyond it. This critical relation operates in both directions. In the controversies over interpretation of the formal qualities of a work, in which the sense of history is always brought to bear, the different ways in which history can be understood, are also often opened up.
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