CLS4250

Marxist critical theory

Proposed to be offered next in 1999

Andrew Milner

12 points
* 2 hours per week
* Clayton
* Prohibitions: CRT4250

Objectives Upon completion of this subject students should be able to demonstrate substantial familiarity with recent debates in cultural theory; articulate the analytical skills, theoretical vocabularies and conceptual apparatuses studied in the subject; demonstrate a sense of their own personal and cultural reflexivity; write clear, grammatically and syntactically appropriate, independent essays on the topics chosen for assessment. Students should also be able to write a less descriptive and more self-reflexive final essay.

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 World War One. 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 World War One 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 Two seminar papers (1000- 1500 words each): 20% each
* Long essay (6000 words): 60%
* Students will be required to read more complex critical texts and to write a less descriptive and more self-reflexive long essay.

Preliminary reading

Anderson P Considerations on Western Marxism New Left, 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, 1979
Althusser L Lenin and philosophy and other essays New Left, 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, 1977
de Beauvoir S The second sex Jonathan Cape, 1968
Eagleton T Walter Benjamin New Left, 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, 1976
Williams R Marxism and literature OUP, 1977