Marxism and Literature

Literature is one of the major constituents of consciousness, and should be studied within the framework of history. As much as literature can be used as an oppressive tool to maintain and enforce the master-capitalist hegemony, it can also be used to undermine this hegemony.

For Marxism, literature can be viewed in two main ways, regardless of the difference in opinion and practice among various Marxist thinkers and critics such as Lucaks, Brecht, Adorno, Raymond, Jameson and others:

As reactionary narrative that aims at marketing, devoting and enforcing the ruling classes’ ideology; yet not without contradictions, that can undermine its basic thematic assumption(s). As a progressive narrative that champions the oppressed in their long and bitter struggle against the decadent bourgeois order. Some traditional Marxist critics including Lukacs stressed the importance of realism in writing and denigrated other modes of narrative like naturalism, post/modernism as less, if at all, representative of class struggle. In defense of their theoretical position, they claim that modernist writers, like Eliot, Joyce, Wolf among others dwell usually in their writings on the personal experiences of demented characters that can hardly be taken to represent the suffering and struggle of the oppressed at large. Traditional Marxists favored realism because of its total representation of people in real situations trying to improve their social conditions by engaging with the repressive forces in the bourgeois world. They favored narratives that compromise inherited bourgeois obsolete ethics and values. Other thinkers and writers like Brecht, Adorno, Althusser among others considered all forms and schools of narrativity suitable for exposing human suffering, class conflict and the various ideologies that dominate the world of the text and shape consciousness of the generations.