hegemony

Marxist Literary Criticism: An Overview

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 ›

Hegemony

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 ›

Althusserian Marxism

Louis Althusser combined Marxism with the scientifically oriented methods of Structuralism in his essay, Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses (1970) and analysed how the dominant systems enforce their control by subtly moulding their subjects through ideology. Ideology has been… Read More ›

Subaltern (Postcolonialism)

In the last two decades of the 20th century, Subaltern Studies, postcolonial theory and criticism gained momentum, especially, as a corollary to globalisation in the Third World countries. If postcolonial criticism is taken as an offshoot of postmodernism, subaltern studies… Read More ›

Foucault’s Concept of Power

Although the interrogation of power on a wider scale is implicit in Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism- the belief that language provides access to truth — the interest in power and its workings that dominates the  poststructuraiist criticism of the 1980s… Read More ›