MONASH UNIVERSITY FACULTY HANDBOOKS
Arts Undergraduate Handbook 1996
Published by Monash University
Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia
Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996
CRT4250
Marxist critical theory
Proposed to be offered next in 1997
Andrew Milner
8 or 12 points + 2 hours per week + Clayton
Synopsis `Western Marxism' is the term coined by Merleau-Ponty to
describe that tradition of `critical' Marxism which developed in Western Europe
and later in the United States by way of a more or less deliberate reaction
against official communist Marxism. Literary and cultural theory represents one
of the more significant dimensions of Western Marxist thought in the period
since the First World War. As Perry Anderson observes: `Western Marxism ...
came to concentrate overwhelmingly on study of superstructures ... It
was culture that held the central focus of its attention'. The subject will
examine the two main waves of Western Marxist theorising: that which developed
in the aftermath of the First World War and under the impress of the social
crises of the interwar period; and that which developed as a critique of
advanced capitalism from the 1960s onwards. They will each be examined for
their respective accounts of the relationships between art, culture and
society.
Assessment (8 points) Two seminar papers + Long essay (4000 words)
Assessment (12 points) Two seminar papers + Long essay (6000 words)
Preliminary reading
- Anderson P Considerations on Western Marxism New Left Books, 1976
- Bennett T Formalism and Marxism Methuen, 1979
- Eagleton T Marxism and literary criticism Methuen, 1976
- Nelson C and Grossberg L (eds) Marxism and the interpretation of
culture Macmillan, 1988
Recommended texts
- Adorno T and Horkheimer M Dialectic of enlightenment New Left Books,
1979
- Althusser L Lenin and philosophy and other essays New Left Books,
1971
- Bakhtin M The dialogical imagination U Texas P, 1981
- Benjamin W Illuminations Fontana, 1973
- Berman M All that is solid melts into air: The experience of
modernity New Left Books, 1982
- Bloch E and others Aesthetics and politics New Left Books, 1977
- de Beauvoir S The second sex Jonathan Cape, 1968
- Eagleton T Walter Benjamin New Left Books, 1981
- Goldmann L Towards a sociology of the novel Tavistock, 1975
- Gramsci A Selections from the prison notebooks Lawrence and Wishart,
1971
- Habermas J The philosophical discourse of modernity Polity Press,
1988
- Jameson F The political unconscious Methuen, 1981
- Lukács G History and class consciousness Merlin Press, 1971
- Marx K and Engels F The German ideology Part I, Lawrence and
Wishart, 1970
- Sartre J-P Critique of dialectical reason vol. I, New Left Books,
1976
- Williams R Marxism and literature OUP, 1977
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