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 is dense, but his social theory focuses on what he saw as the power of society, history, and the accretion of mass experience over individual will and behavior. Where intellectual discourse, including literary texts, becomes relevant, it is formulated in the terms of socioeconomic analysis:
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men hat determines their b...