Marxist Literary Criticism Today, by Barbara Foley. London: Pluto Press, 2019. Paper, $29.00. Pp. 265.
Barbara Foley’s much-needed Marxist Literary Criticism Today is the first major introductory text on the application of Marxism in literary studies since Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) and Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature (1977). It is not so much an account of the different varieties of Marxist criticism, though Foley is obviously quite conversant with those varieties, as it is a primer in basic Marxist concepts as tools for understanding and evaluating literature and the cultural work it does. It is also an argument for the efficacy of Marxism for literary interpretation in the service of changing the world. The book is divided into two parts. The first introduces (or reintroduces) the reader to fundamental concepts of Marxism and its methodology. This is one of the most valuable features of the book. Even Raymond Williams, who, too, spent considerable space on basic Marxist concepts of culture, presupposed that the reader had a working knowledge of Marxism. Foley recognizes, however, that in the United States at least many students and scholars have only a fragmentary familiarity with Marx and a limited number of Marxist, neo-Marxist, and post-Marxist thinkers and critics, and are not conversant with Marxism and the Marxist tradition in a sustained way. She provides extremely useful glosses on, among other things, historical materialism, dialectics, ideology, and Marxist economics. While her primary sources for the first portion of the book are Marx and Engels, Foley also draws upon more recent Marxist thinkers, particularly the Hungarian literary and cultural critic Georg Lukács and his notion of “reification,” French philosopher Louis Althusser and his use of “interpellation,” and U. S. literary and cultural critic Frederic Jameson and his concept of the “political unconscious.” The second part of Marxist Literary Criticism Today focuses on literature itself, its definition, interpretation, and teaching from a Marxist perspective. The first chapter of this section discusses a range of topics (commonplaces of bourgeois criticism, really) about what makes literature “literary” (and what makes “good” literature “good”), such as “density,” “showing not telling,” and “universality.” Foley in many cases questions assumptions that are still made all too often about these commonplaces. For example, she quotes to good effect the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen’s declaration that U. S. immigrant writers “come with the desire not just to show, but to tell.” At same time Foley does not simply dismiss qualities of what makes literature literary, but often revises them or recasts them in a Marxist modality. She does not, for instance, reject “universality” as such. What she does reject is any notion of universal values that are somehow above economic class and other historical particularities. Foley frequently refers to Jameson’s directive to “always historicize.” She does suggest that there are human experiences, emotions, and so on, in literature and art that can speak across historical moments. However, she adds that these representations are always written and received in specific historical and cultural contexts. In the succeeding chapter, Foley takes up the general types and con- cerns of Marxist literary criticism, again organized around themes and issues: rhetoric and interpellation; ideological critique; symptomatic reading; humanism, realism, and proletarian literature; alternative hegemony. As in the previous chapter, she doesn’t pretend that her list of concerns is exhaustive; again, she proposes these concerns as an introduction to what Marxist criticism is and what it might do. The portion of the chapter on realism and how Marxist writers and critics have approached the question of representing (and transforming) the real, both in terms of surface detail and of essence, is particularly good. This, after all, is a central concern of any Marxist artist attempting to change the world, and has been the subject of some of the greatest debates among Marxist artists and critics, as in the argument over the value of 19th-century realism versus that of the later avant-garde between Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht. The final chapter on pedagogy takes up the actual application of Marxist theory to literary texts. Foley deftly follows Jameson’s dictum on always historicizing to deploy various Marxist readings of popular and “literary” texts within carefully drawn historical and cultural contexts, once more organized around topics, such as “race and racism,” “gender and sexuality,” and “nature.” These readings are convincing and often quite striking, as in the description of Christian Gray in E. L. James’ Fifty Shades of Gray as “Capital as pure money in seductive human form.” It would have been good if Foley had more often historicized Marxist theory and Marxist criticism, and its relation to other schools of criticism, in the same skillful way she did her readings of texts. Such criticism and theory are inevitably a product of a certain place in a certain time. For example, the critical theory, Marxist, non-Marxist, and anti-Marxist, that emerged out of France in the 1950s and 1960s was shaped by an inescapable fact of French intellectual life, the French Communist Party (PCF). The PCF’s version of Marxism was a sort of starting point that, say, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva had to negotiate or finesse, whether from inside the Party (like Althusser) or outside (like Foucault after he left the PCF in the 1950s). This had profound effects on their influential work that would not be the case of critical theorists in the United States, which was sort of another planet ideologically in the 1950s and early 1960s. However, that is a relatively minor reservation. After all, Foley intended this book as an introduction to Marxist literary criticism (and Marxism in general), making basic concepts and their application accessible and understandable to students as well as offering teachers ways of presenting Marxist approaches to literature in the classroom. In those objectives, the book succeeds admirably. James Smethurst University of Massachusetts/Amherst P.O. 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