Marxism and Critical

Theory
 What is Marxism ?
Marxism is a social, political, and economic theory
originated by Karl Marx, which focuses on the
struggle between capitalists and the working
class.
Marx wrote that the power relationships between
capitalists and workers were inherently
exploitative and would inevitably create class
conflict.
 "Marxism attempts to
reveal the ways in which
our socioeconomic system
is the ultimate source of
our experience" (Tyson
277).
 Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a philosopher,
author, social theorist, and an economist. He is
famous for his theories about capitalism and
communism. Some of his works are:
The German Ideology (1846)
The Communist Manifesto(1848) – with Engels
Das Kapital (1867)
 Terms :
Bourgeoisie : the name given by Marx to the owners of the
means of productions in a society.
• Ideology : A belief system
• Proletariat : The name given by Marx to the workers in the
society.
• Capitalism is an economic system that is based on private
ownership of the means of production and the creation of
goods or services for profit.
Marxism In Modern Literature
Like Freudian theory, Marxist theory's
influence on Modern art and literature can be
first broken down by its influence of writers,
and the works they produced, and on readers,
and the way critics use Marxist theory to
interpret the works.
The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young
BY WILLIAM BLAKE
When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head

That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved, so I said,

"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,

You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."
 The Chimney Sweeper” is a title of two poems by
William Blake which is published in Songs of
Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1792). The
background of this poem is the dark side of a prominent
child labor in 18th and 19th Century in England. Most of
the children work as chimney sweepers. They were
oppressed by the master because they should clean the
chimney that has a small size and they paid low. This
poem is Blake’s commentary of the child labor issue and
the use of imagery is to portray the brutality of The
Industrial Revolution, one of crucial period in history.
https://istorialina.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/the-chimney-sweeper-
by-william-blake-a-marxist-analysis/
 Who was the
Bourgeoisie and the
proletariat?

https://istorialina.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/the-chimney-sweeper-
by-william-blake-a-marxist-analysis/
In “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence,
Blake used the children who work as chimney
sweepers to establish working class or the proletariat.
Using a child’s voice, Blake intended to create a unique
perspective of the world because according to Western
legal tradition, children aren’t supposed to voice their
interest. Unlike adults, children tend to address a matter
differently, especially with their innocence, the message
will appear more sympathetic.

https://istorialina.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/the-chimney-sweeper-
by-william-blake-a-marxist-analysis/
To gain sympathy from readers, Blake voiced out his concern
and towards children exploitation issue using a child’s voice
who talks about the misery the children experienced:

“And my father sold me while yet my tongue / Could

scarcely cry ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep’” (line 2-3).
In the line 4, Blake used possessive pronoun “your” to
include the readers to the poem:

“So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.” (line 4)

 Questions in Marxist criticism
1) What is the economic status of the characters?
2) What happens to them as a result of this status?
3) How do they fare against economic and political odds?
4) What other conditions stemming from their class does the writer emphasize?
5) To what extent does the work fail by overlooking the economic, social, and political
implications of its material?
6) In what other ways does economic determinism affect the work?
7) How should the reader’s consider this story in today’s developed or underdeveloped world?
 What is Critical Theory?
Critical theory, Marxist-inspired movement in social and
political philosophy originally associated with the work of the
Frankfurt School. Drawing particularly on the thought of Karl
Marx and Sigmund Freud, critical theorists maintain that a
primary goal of philosophy is to understand and to help
overcome the social structures through which people are
dominated and oppressed.
 Persons under Critical Theory
ANTONIO GRAMSCI – -born on January 22, 1891 in Italy -Most important Marxist of
the 20th century. He is known for his concept of cultural hegemony- maintaining the
state of capitalist country. He was clear that the transformation from capitalism to
socialism required mass.
JURGEN HABERMAS --Born outside Düsseldorf in 1929, Habermas came of age in
postwar Germany -Habermas embraced the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
-Habermas' primary contribution to philosophy is his development of a theory of
rationality. -
THEODOR ADORNO -was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in
Germany after World War II -The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the
interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he
belonged. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first
generation of Critical Theory.
 Focuses of Critical Theory:
CRITIQUE It examines the issue of who – what class –
controls educational institutions and processes and
establishes educational goals and priorities.
REFORM We must work against cultural agents that
reproduce the status quo (social, political, and
economic)
Structuralism and
Post-structuralism
Structuralism first developed in Anthropology
(Claude Lévi-Strauss), in literary and
cultural studies (Roman Jakobson,
Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette),
psychoanalysis, and intellectual history
(Culler 17). Structuralism enjoyed popularity
in the 1950s and 1960s in both European and
American literary theory and criticism.
 The structuralist school emerges from theories of
language and linguistics, and it looks for underlying
elements in culture and literature that can be connected
so that critics can develop general conclusions about the
individual works and the systems from which they
emerge. In fact, structuralism maintains that "...practically
everything we do that is specifically human is expressed
in language" (Richter 809). Structuralists believe that
these language symbols extend far beyond written or oral
communication.
For example, codes that represent all sorts of things
permeate everything we do: "the performance of
music requires complex notation...our economic life
rests upon the exchange of labor and goods for
symbols, such as cash, checks, stock, and
certificates...social life depends on the meaningful
gestures and signals of 'body language' and revolves
around the exchange of small, symbolic favors:
drinks, parties, dinners" (Richter 809).
 Terms
Sign the basic unit of Saussurean linguistics, a physical entity
consisting of a signifier (an acoustic image) and a
signified (a concept); a sign is said to be arbitrary
because a logical relationship between the signifier and
signified does not necessarily exist

Referent the extra-linguistic object to which a sign refers; the

relationship between the sign and referent are also
arbitrary and conventional

Binary Opposition a pair of related terms or concepts that appear to be

opposite in meaning (e.g., light/dark)
 Terms
Signs, Signifiers, and Signified
Semiotics is concerned with signs and their relationship with objects
and meaning. One way to view signs is to consider them composed
of a signifier and a signified. Simply put, the signifier is the sound
associated with or image of something (e.g., a tree), the signified is
the idea or concept of the thing (e.g., the idea of a tree), and the
sign is the object that combines the signifier and the signified
into a meaningful unit.

https://oregonstate.edu/instruct/theory/signs.html - - - -
example if needed
 Terms

https://oregonstate.edu/instruct/theory/signs.html - - - -
example if needed
Foundational Questions of Structuralist Criticism
•What patterns in the text reveal its similarities
to other texts?
•What binary oppositions (e.g., light/dark,
good/evil, old/young, masculine/feminine, and
natural/artificial, etc.) operate in the text?
•How is each part of the binary valued? Does the
binary imply a hierarchy (e.g., is light better
than dark, is an old age more valuable than a
young age, etc.)?
Poststructuralism
. In poststructuralism, the reader and not the writer
became paramount: the author’s intended meaning,
because it could never be truly known, was less
important than the reader’s perceived meaning.
Like other postmodern theories that interrogated
cultural assumptions, poststructuralists believe in
studying both the text and the systems of
knowledge that produced that text.
 Post-Structuralism is a late 20th
Century movement in philosophy and literary
criticism, which is difficult to
summarize but which generally defines itself
in its opposition to the
popular Structuralism movement which
preceded it in 1950s and 1960s France.
 In the Post-Structuralist approach to textual
analysis, the reader replaces the author as the
primary subject of inquiry and, without a central
fixation on the author, Post-Structuralists
examine other sources for meaning (e.g., readers,
cultural norms, other literature, etc), A reader's
culture and society, then, share at least an equal
part in the interpretation of a piece to the cultural
and social circumstances of the author.
  The interpretation of meaning of a text is
therefore dependent on a reader's own personal
concept of self.
 An author's intended meaning (although the author's
own identity as a stable "self" with a single, discernible
"intent" is also a fictional construct) is secondary to
the meaning that the reader perceives, and a literary
text (or, indeed, any situation where a subject perceives
a sign) has no single purpose, meaning or existence
New Historicism
New Historicism is all about paying close attention
to the historical context of the literary works. New
Historicism is an approach to literary criticism and
literary and literary theory based on the premise
that a literary should be considered a product of
time , place and historical circumstances of its
composition rather than as an isolated work of art
or text.
New historicist aim simultaneously to understand the work through it’s historical context and to
understand culture as well as to investigate the intellectual history and cultural history
through literature.
how a work of literary work comments on and relates to its context.

So the New Historicists aim to do two things: first, they want to study how a work of literature
reflects its historical and sociocultural context—that’s why you’ll often find dust-covered
New Historicists digging in ancient archives to get the background for that one line in one
poem.
Second, they want to understand how a literary work comments on and relates to its
context. So the archive hunt won’t just reveal that this thing was written in 1385, but also what
it was like to live in that year, and what people (or at least poets) thought and felt at that
starriest of historical moments.
So what do New Historicists do, aside from
archive-digging? Well, their approaches are
really interdisciplinary. They throw together
history, literature, anthropology, sociology,
economics and whatever else takes their
fancy. 
  
Cultural materialism
 Cultural Materialism is an anthropological
paradigm founded upon, but not constrained by,
Marxist Materialistic thought.
The term Cultural Materialism, first coined by
Marvin Harris in his The Rise of Anthropological
Theory (1968), is derived from two English words:
 "Culture" (social structure, language, law, religion,
politics, art, science, superstition, etc.) and

"Materialism" (materiality, rather than intellect or

spirituality, is fundamental to reality). Harris developed
Cultural Materialism by borrowing from existing
anthropological doctrines, especially Marxist
Materialism.
 Cultural Materialism - Infrastructure, Structure and Superstructure

Cultural Materialism retains and expands upon the Marxist Three

Levels of Culture Model: Infrastructure, Structure and Superstructure.

Infrastructure -- population, basic biological need, and resources

(labor, equipment, technology, etc.).
Structure -- pattern of organization (government, education,
production regulation, etc.).
Superstructure -- social institutions (law, religion, politics, art, science,
superstition, values, emotions, traditions, etc.).
 • Cultural Materialism holds that Infrastructure has
influence on Structure, while Structure exerts little
influence upon Infrastructure.
• Cultural Materialism seeks to explain cultural
organization, ideology and symbolism within a
materialistic
(Infrastructure/structure/superstructure) framework.
• law, government, religion, family values, etc. must be
beneficial to society or they will cease to exist within
society.