#marxist lit crit crash course for one

[criphd]

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I confess that I have only read the “Jewish” parts of Marxism and Form (1971), my favorite work by Fredric Jameson, the great literary theorist who died this week. That is to say, I have read the chapters on Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, Lukács—all but the chapter on Sartre, which is, at least for me, a hundred pages of impenetrable, gentile boredom. The names of these theorists are emblazoned on the book’s cover as if they were a musical supergroup, like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Jameson was trying to explain and defend Hegelian Marxism, which promised that historical materialism could approach literary texts not as propaganda or morality plays, but as complex forms, in whose development we could chart the course of an evolving, universal history. Somehow, the book he ended up writing consists of a series of mournful vignettes about Central European Jewish intellectuals.

It’s hard to know what Jameson would have thought of this observation, not just because his origins were WASPy and patrician, but because he largely avoided personal reflection, even as he built a superstar career defending, often single handedly, Marxism’s claim to primacy among High Theories. But the Jewishness of Marxism and Form is no coincidence. It reflects the “elective affinity” Michael Löwy would later trace between early 20th-century Central European Jewish writers, barred by antisemitic prejudice from academic postings, and thus institutionally marginalized and driven toward a utopian, romantic mode of left-wing politics. Löwy’s student Enzo Traverso later studied a cohort of doubly “heretical” adherents of what he called “Judeo-Marxism,” who rejected the vulgar, dogmatic scientism of Karl Kautsky and the Second International, as well as Orthodox religiosity and post-war Zionism. Often rebels against both Jewish and contemporary left pieties, these Judeo-Marxists produced eccentric, offbeat theories, probed the arcane troves of Kabbalah and Christian mysticism, and tended more toward modernist experimentation than by-the-book socialist realism. Thus, if one wanted, as Jameson did, to find sources for a Marxism that was intellectually rich, thick with ironies and paradoxes, and critically adequate not just to proletarian novels and folks songs, but to Balzac and Beethoven (and then, in Jameson’s eclectic, catholic, and massive corpus of writing, to pretty much any cultural artifact whatsoever), then of course one would end up writing about Jews.

And despite Jameson’s ideal of objective impersonality, there are hints he was aware of his Jewish focus. A section epigraph in his chapter on Ernst Bloch reads, “Next Year in Jerusalem! —Old Jewish Prayer,” the single pithiest distillation of the utopian longing that animates Jameson’s whole career. More telling, perhaps, is the uncharacteristically personal turn with which he concludes his discussion of Marcuse, writing that despite the bleak, unrevolutionary conditions of mid-century American capitalism, “it pleases me for another moment still to contemplate the stubborn rebirth of the idea of freedom” in several minds, the last of which is that of Marcuse, the “philosopher, in the exile of that immense housing development which is the state of California, remembering, reawakening, reinventing—from the rows of products in the supermarkets, from the roar of traffic of the freeways and the ominous shape of the helmets of traffic policemen, from the incessant overhead traffic of the fleets of military transport planes, as it were from beyond them, in the future—the almost extinct form of the Utopian idea.”

In Jameson’s hands, the paradigmatically Jewish condition of exile undergoes a double metamorphosis, first into Marcuse’s estrangement from the land of his birth by the Nazi catastrophe, which either killed or uprooted nearly all of Jameson’s book’s subjects, and then second, into the existential predicament of the social theorist lost in post-war consumer capitalism, adrift in a history that seemed to have lost its plot. That predicament, and his oft-repeated, defiant insistence that nonetheless, one must not, could not, forget Jerusalem and the dream of a redeemed future, was, of course, Jameson’s great theme. So it pleases me, in spite of his studied impersonality, to point out that in 1971, Jameson had only recently left Harvard for the University of California, San Diego, where he overlapped with Marcuse for several years—and that perhaps here is an autobiographical clue that Jameson was a quiet devotee of our exilic tradition, which he reimagined as the melancholy condition of the left intellectual in an unfriendly historical moment, struggling to transform his nostalgia into hope for a future, into a yearning for a world transformed.

-- from the jewish currents shabbat reading list & parshat nitzavim-vayelech [idk if it's accessible now but i've linked a sign up to the newsletter]

[criphd]

an alternative marxist literary criticism reading list by me...

the young karl marx (der junge karl marx) (2017) directed by Raoul Peck

john berger's four part series 'ways of seeing'

miss marx (2020), whilst this film is a mixed bag it does [not purposefully ?] show some of the tensions between women of different classes attempting to be in solidarity with eachother & it's also intertextual & foregrounds the idea that literature is a vital part of expressing and cultivating revolutionary struggle, (u can see one of those key scenes here)

this essay about marxism and postcolonial theory

time is away: john berger nts special

the various lectures on marx & benjamin by dr andrew stones which can be accessed here along w a whole bunch of others + readings & powerpoints

the article ‘willa cather and “the storyteller”: hostility to the novel in my ántonia' by richard millington (message me & i can send u a pdf) which takes up benjamin's essay the storyteller & pleasingly uses his work to think about the novel

newsies the musical (1992) lmao .. the christian bale version ofc

for a short [like less than 80 pages short!) intro to marxist literary criticism i think terry eagleton's marxism and literary criticism (1976) is good

& also this article by daniel hartley which is pretty thorough but also pretty clear i thought about marxist thought & the different concepts etc

i am also a benjamin fangirl so i would also include the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, which is collected in the book illuminations (1955)

diane di prima's revolutionary letters .... what can poetry do for revolution?? di prima answers this is many beautiful ways

ideas for a new art world, zm, the white pube

the fury archives: female citizenship, human rights, and the international avant-gardes by juno jill richards (2020)

red rosa: a graphic biography of rosa luxemburg by kate evans (2015)

a few bonus novels to read & think about ....

victoria benedictsson's money, trans. sarah death (1885)

gingerbread by helen oyeyemi (2019)

conversations with friends by sally rooney (2017)

the employees by olga ravn (2018) trans. martin aitken

lote by shola von reinhold (2020) obviously !!

attainment by edith ellis (1909)

[criphd]

if raymond williams' idea of 'structures of feeling' is somewhat about inarticulations of political-social thoughts in texts & culture or that like there are inarticulate threads that nonetheless deligetimise the economic/etc set up of society etc then isnt that just the same idea as macherey's conception of literary 'gaps' as guiders of ideological constructions & countercultural meanings ??? are all marxist critics [and ig cultural materialist ones... altho the venn diagram is basically a circle w that i think] just saying the same thing w differnt terms for it... like what is the difference between these things.... am i totally missing it all ?? i do worry i dont know anything whatsoever about that but i do~ think thats imposter syndrome.. but obviously i could still be mistaken.... and i mean jameson's idea of an ideologeme is surely conversant w macheryan ideas abt ideology & gaps ...

[criphd]

"Finally, a word about literary criticism. Although it may appear that this humanistic field of inquiry has relatively little to do with the formation of revolutionary consciousness and activity - marxist critics, I readily concede, hardly occupy the frontline of the battle against the capitalist juggernaut - the project undertaken here can assist, however modestly, in developing an understanding of culture and society that has political value. The study of literary texts and traditions can reveal the inevitable rootedness of thought and writing in the tensions and pressures of history. It can heighten our sensitivity to the ways in which language functions to bind people to the status quo, as well as to imagine alternatives to the way we live now. It can demonstrate how rebellion and acquiescence frequently cohabit within the same consciousness. It can direct attention to the need for a proletarian literature attunded to the requirements of the present moment. It can connect the struggle in the mind and heart with the struggle in the streets. It can assist in the project called for by Marx in the famous "Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach," namely, of not just interpreting but also changing the world."

-- marxist literary criticism today, barbara foley

[criphd]

from the very beginning of my university experience i decided i would basically only cite women academics. this was part of my refusal of the domination of men on the reading lists and just like the constancy of the male gaze & men's violence within & in perpetuating the literary canon etc etc and honestly after a while i didnt even realise i was doing it lol because it was never a problem for me... but now my lack of male critic reading means i have to basically do a crash course in marxist literary criticism for my phd.... eagleton, althusser, williams and on and on so that's ... fun

i do think i probably quoted adorno and bakhtin once in one essay but even when i was referring to male critics works i was often doing so thru the lense of a woman theorist or critic like luce irigaray for example or eleanor marx or sylvia federici or whomever so i do have some idea what these men are saying just like with more of a focus on what they missed [almost always gender] and where i would disagree [again almost always about gender lol]

so anyway that's what i've been trying to do this week and will continue next week definitely, fill in some gaps, think about this stuff more clearly or """directly"""...

[criphd]

"Marxism is at once a method of socioeconomic analysis and a call for revolutionary social transformation. It is also an interpretive framework indispensable to an understanding of the relationship between literature and society - and thus, more generally of the connections between ideas, attitudes, and emotions on the one hand and their grounding in historical forces on the other."

-- marxist literary criticism today, barbara foley

[criphd]

watching the young karl marx counts as learning about marxist literary criticism, right ?!

[criphd]

just got a book called guide to marxist literary criticism from the library that was probably last taken out by someone when it was first published... in 1980.... i am literally allergic to it lol its so dusty !!