Approaches to Criticism

This research examines fundamental differences between the Marxist and formalist approaches to criticism. The research will refer to relevant Marxist commentary and commentary that explicates the rationale for the validity of the structuralist critical perspective standpoint, as well as to works that illustrate how each approach aims to clarify patterns of ideas and the means by which they are developed in literary texts.

The far-reaching cross-disciplinary implications of Marxist social theory have been the subject of extensive commentary. In part that is because Marx took culture, like the rest of the content of industrial capitalism, as part of his subject. Further, he appears to have applied his fundamental argument about prevailing social structure to analysis of culture as well as economy. Thus such concepts as alienation, division of labor, class consciousness, control of the means of production, and so on--all rather sensibly linked to economic analysis--surface in Marx's evaluation of cultural structures and content. The post-Romantic nineteenth-century culture of industrial capitalism, in which Marx functioned (in liberal constitutional-democracy England, by the way, not totalitarian czarist Russia or his native Prussian-state Germany) was taken as his subject in all its aspect. And in his revolutionary aspect, Marx sought to break with the past, or more precisely with the accretion of history that had inhered in the structures of social dominance. Marx's argument

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y constructed. For one thing, she cannot simply run away from home and make her way in the world alone the way men (at least in theory) can. For another, she is alienated from the social realities, having internalized supposed values of a culture that is mercilessly intolerant of poverty. Hence her preoccupation with such values as "felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books" (Flaubert 21). Good little bourgeoisie that she is, she is "incapable . . . of believing anything that did not present itself in conventional forms" (Flaubert 26). In consequence, and abetted by her solipsism and extravagance, every stratagem Emma devises for escaping genteel poverty betrays her. The power of social hieroglyphics to which Marx refers resonates in modern Marxist analysis. Marcuse, for example, asserts that modern industrial society--after all not structured so very differently than the social arrangements of post-Romantic 19th-century bourgeois Europe--has employed cultural artifacts in a project of absorbing individual autonomy while masquerading as a social leveling mechanism, a dynamic particularly evident in the US: [T]he so-called equalization of class distinctions reveals its ideological function. If the w

Category: Philosophy - A