Marxist Criticism (Lectures in Literary Theory)

Описание: What do capitalism and class struggle have to do with analyzing literature? Watch and find out!

This video is not an argument for or against Marxism, but simply a presentation of Marxist ideas as I understand them, especially those which are relevant to the criticism of literature and culture and which have contributed to the vocabulary of theory and criticism.

This video, based on years of lecturing in a second-year course called "Critical Approaches to Literature," is intended for students and learners who are relatively new to Marxist ideas. It introduces some basic Marxist concepts and surveys the development of Marxist critical thought in the 20th century with attention to some key figures, but also has some gaps (Walter Benjamin, Marxism and psychonanalysis).

Table of Contents:

00:00 - Introduction
01:33 - My goals: education, not persuasion
02:26 - Who was Karl Marx?
03:44 - Marxism and Literature: Why?
04:16 - I. Marxism: Definition and Origins
06:41 - Marx's Theory of History
12:39 - II. Key Ideas of Classical Marxism
12:56 - Hegelian Dialectic and Materialism
16:49 - Four Key Marxist Ideas
17:25 - 1: Labor Theory of Value
19:09 - 2: Alienation of Labor
20:59 - 3: Commodity fetish
23:51 - 4: Base and Superstructure
24:48 - Summary: Ideas and Material Conditions
25:58 - Ideology according to Marxism
28:36 - The Crisis of Marxism in the 20th C.
30:34 - III. Neo-Marxism and Critical theory
30:56 - Marxist Literary Criticism: Core Methods
34:28 - Mikhail Bakhtin
39:39 - Antonio Gramsci
43:34 - The Frankfurt School
49:18 - Louis Althusser
52:52 - IV. Academic Marxism in the West
53:35 - Raymond Williams
58:40 - Fredric Jameson
1:02:53 - Terry Eagleton
1:04:24 - Race, Gender, and Ethnic Studies
1:08:15 - Is Critical Race Theory Marxism?
1:09:29 - How to Read Like a Marxist Critic
1:14:00 - Concluding thoughts!


Basic Bibliography
• Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels) The Communist Manifesto, 1848; Das Kapital, 1867; "Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions" from The German Ideology, 1932; "On Greek Art in Its Time" from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859
• Leon Trotsky - "Literature and Revolution," 1923
• Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, 1925-1939 (published later)
• Georg Lukács "The Ideology of Modernism," 1956
• M.M. Bakhtin, “Discourse of the Novel” (1935), various others
• Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," 1936
• Theodor W. Adorno, various
• Louis Althusser, Reading Capital (1965); “Ideology and ISAs” (1970)
• Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, Criticism and Ideology, 1976
• Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, 1971
• Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (1989)