Review of Therborn’s From Marxism to Post-Marxism?

Göran Therborn is one of the few leading academics and intellectuals of our times whom I have actually met – he was guest of honour at a workshop held at our university concerning Southeast Asian cities within the context of urban studies more broadly. At close range, despite occasionally having to close his eyes owing to the exigencies of travelling from Cambridge (where he holds his chair and had just been awarded an honorary doctorate) to Bangkok, he was very impressive through the broad range of his knowledge, analytical capacity and ability to draw upon examples and ideas from a diverse selection of fields of study.

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Sartre: What Is an Intellectual?

According to French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, an intellectual is a person who recognizes the contradictions that govern her or his life. An intellectual cannot be a member of the proletariat because such a person would find it impossible to gain access to the kind of education required by an intellectual.

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Review of Sartre’s Between Existentialism and Marxism

Whereas Marxism locates the individual within an overarching class struggle that defines her consciousness, existentialism locates individuals as specific people who experience being-in-the-universe. This tension (one might be tempted to say ‘contradiction’) informed much of Sartre’s thought and is occasionally touched upon in the essays and interviews collected together in this book. At one stage, the Marxist element takes centre stage and, at others, the existentialist replaces it.

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Marxist Literary Criticism: Social Realism

Since Marxism is a specifically materialist ideology, it seems sensible to assume that Marxist literary criticism will deal primarily with what is demonstrably material and real. Further, since Marxism is clear on the fact that social conditions determine consciousness, then it would also be logical to assume that the kind of literature that would be preferred from this perspective would focus on the daily lives of the real people of society.

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Reivew of Williams: Culture and Materialism

Raymond Williams was one of the most influential critics and theorists on culture and literature in the Twentieth Century. This collection of essays, gathered together as Culture and Materialism, illustrates his work at its most insightful and authoritative, with works ranging from literary criticism to historical evaluations to assessments of the possibilities for the present and future of the Marxist left in the UK.

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Marxist Literary Criticism: Vulgar Marxism

One of the most commonly made mistakes – and one I have made myself more than once – is to confuse the multiple approaches and aspects of what has come to be known as Marxist literary criticism with a vulgar form.

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Marxist Literary Criticism: Ideology and Literature

Marxist literary criticism only partly depends on the works of Marx and Engels themselves since, although both enjoyed literature and the arts greatly and often quoted from favourite works, their writings only occasionally touched upon the subject. Further, these references are scattered and lacking in systematic analysis.

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Williams: Base and Superstructure in Literary Criticism

As part of his influential writings on cultural theory, Raymond Williams tackled the issue of base and superstructure in literary (and indeed all forms of cultural) criticism. Base and superstructure is a crucial concept in Marxist thought: the base is the set of economic conditions and the relationships between different classes in society and the modes of production used in that society

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I’m using the new computer now and not quite used to it – so some typos in the original article. That’s my excuse anyway.

What Is Alienation?

Alienation is a term that started to come into use in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often as a result of its association with the onset of mass industrialisation and those social phenomena known generally as ‘modernism.’ In this sense, alienation has been used in a number of different and sometimes contradictory ways.

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Review of Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism

According to Marx and Engels, societies exist through an economic base determined by the relations between classes as affected by the means of production. On top of this base rests a superstructure of aesthetics, cultural and political institutions which in part reflect the economic base and partly are in conflict or even contradictory to it.

Read the full review here.