Szőcs Gábor

Zámbóné Kocic Larisa

Introduction to English literature and culture 2
Thursday’s course from 1400 to 1530

Key terms: NEW HISTORICISM, MARXISM, CULTURAL

MATERIALISM
Modes of production:
-It refers to the stages of History. It includes, for instance: primitive communism, feudalism,
capitalism, etc.
-These are all defined by a combination of forces of production and relations of productions. The first
is the techincal, scientific and material parts of the economy, like tools (assembly line), and the other
one is how people organise themselves around labor (people working for wages or to sell their own
goods) There is a 3rd one, which is the means of production. (The materials you need to use in order to
labor and produce goods)
Relations between the economic base and the ideological superstructure:
-The economic or with another word, the base infrastructure is the economic aspect of life, which
indicates the tools that we use and the way we organize ourselves. It involves technological change
and innovation. (Economic reality that tells us how we work)
-Ideological superstructure is ABOVE economic base, so it is somehow affected by economic base.
The influence is from economics to superstructure. It includes literature, entertainment, law and
politics as well, everything that involves consciousness.
Power/powerlessness and empowerment:
-Among different society there are an imbalance of power.
-The ruling class has a bigger economical base, this is the reason why they have bigger power than
lower (e.g. worker) classes.
These power structure ARE the economic base.

Culture:
-Diverse cultures migh be influenced by economic base.
-Culture legitimize the economic base
-Every culture has a surrounded ideology  the texts are usually written of this ideology.

Making-strange-device (Verfremdungseffekt):
-This literary term is connected to the name of Bertolt Brecht, who was a German drama writer
-This device is usually translated like „alienation effect, distancing effect”..., but the best translation is
the „estrangement effect”
-His main goal was to create dramas which will force people to think in a critical way, and give them
uncomfortable thoughts about money, power and ethitcs.
-The main goal of this term was to „wake up” the audience.
Gaps and silences:
-Gaps are places in the text, where readers are invited to make connections between the the book and
the worldthe goal is to understand what the text is about
-Silence means where the text keeps silent or makes no mention of certain groups of topics
Sites of ideological struggle:
-It means, for example that: in a country live many many people, but these people follows different
ideology. These ideologies compete to increase their number of adepts. It will cause that some people
will change their ideology and some who previously don’t have, now will have an ideology that thay
will follow as well. It can happen by mass communication tools or binary conversation.