Karl Marx’s mature writing from A Contribution to the Criticism of Political Economy (1859) through the first edition of Capital (1867) offers to analyze social and economic relations as systems and structures that follow scientific laws. In Marx’s vocabulary, a… Read More ›
Karl Heinrich Marx (1818–1883) was born on May 5, 1818 in Trier, son of a Jewish lawyer who converted to Christianity in 1824. After studying law for a year at the University of Bonn, Marx left the Rhineland for the… Read More ›
University of Calicut V Semester B.A. English Core Paper Methodology of Literature (EN5B03) Methodology of Literature PDF (To Download the Material Click on the Above Link) Topics Covered Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Archetypal Criticism, Myth Criticism, Deconstruction, Poststructuralism, Reader Response… Read More ›
Fetishism is the displacement of desire and fantasy onto alternative objects or body parts (e.g., a foot fetish or a shoe fetish), in order to obviate a subject’s confrontation with the castration complex. According to Sigmund Freud, fetishism is connected… Read More ›
Giorgio Agamben (b.1942) is a philosopher of Italian origin who, since the World Trade Centre attacks in September 2001, has challenged the wide use of emergency measures for people control. Indeed, while en route to give lectures at New York University… Read More ›
Marx and Engels produced no systematic theory of literature or art. Equally, the subsequent history of Marxist aesthetics has hardly comprised the cumulative unfolding of a coherent perspective. Rather, it has emerged, aptly, as a series of responses to concrete… Read More ›
From a Marxist perspective, history is dominated by a struggle between social classes that will only end when a truly classless society has been achieved. Given the fact that throughout history women have been collectively denied important rights, it was… Read More ›
Terry Eagleton’s contribution to Marxist cultural theory is broad in its range. While his earlier writing examined in some depth certain Marxist categories of literary-cultural analysis, his later, more popularizing, work has argued persuasively the need for theory. Eagleton has… Read More ›
While he was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Greenblatt helped to found a journal called Representations, in which some of the earlier important New Historicist criticism appeared. However, it was his introduction to The Power of Forms in… Read More ›
Hegemony, initially a term referring to the dominance of one state within a confederation, is now generally understood to mean domination by consent. This broader meaning was coined and popularized in the 1930s by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who investigated… Read More ›
Chaos theory and complexity theory challenge some of our most deeply held beliefs about the nature of reality. The former claims that natural systems (for example, the weather) are controlled by mysterious forces, called ‘strange attractors‘, such that they are… Read More ›
The Hungarian philosopher and literary critic Gyorgy (or Georg) Lukacs (1885-1971) had a major influence on the development of Western Marxism (that is to say, the largely Hegelian Marxism developed in Western Europe), while also being the most sophisticated literary… Read More ›
German Marxist philosopher, whose interest in Utopian thought has perhaps had as much, if not more, influence on theology (Moltmann 1967) than on philosophy or cultural theory. It is perhaps only a slight exaggeration to suggest that Ernst Bloch’s (1885-1977)… Read More ›
The German literary theorist Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was associated with what is known as the Frankfurt School of German critical theory (although he was never a member of its institutional body, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research). His work is… Read More ›
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), best known for a text called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction where the world of mass produced artworks, in particular those of photography and film, are explored. Benjamin is also regarded as an… Read More ›
Fredric Jameson outlined a dialectic theory of literary criticism in his Marxism and Form (1971), drawing on Hegelian categories such as the notion of totality and the connections of abstract and concrete. Such criticism recognises the need to see its… Read More ›
Terence Francis Eagleton (b: 1943), a student of Raymond Williams, is a literary theorist, and since the 1970s, widely regarded as the most influential British Marxist critic. He has written more than forty books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983),… Read More ›
Raymond Williams (1921-1988) is the most influential Marxist critics of the twentieth century, and one of the leading figures of the New Left. His work with the journal New Left Review and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies laid… Read More ›
The Hungarian thinker and aesthetician Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) has played a pivotal role in the development of Western Marxism, which refers to a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and central Europe. The Western Marxists are in opposition… Read More ›
Althusser is a structuralist Marxist. This should make you ask: How can that be? How can you combine Marxism, which relies on social/historical analysis, with structuralism, which relies on ahistorical/asocial analysis? Althusser answers that initially with distinction between ideologies (historical/social)… Read More ›
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