If you are college student, at some point you may be called upon to write an English term paper utilizing a specific type of literary theory as your thematic foundation. You may already be familiar with some of these critical theory terms and techniques: formalism, feminism, reader-response, new historicism, psychoanalytic, etc. One of the most popular and enjoyable literary theories to apply in the critique of a work of literature is Marxist criticism. Much like psychology that typically uses either Freudian or Lacanian foundations, Marxism was really intended to be used as a technique for critical analysis of literature, but it was so easily integrated and exploited that it became for a brief time the most influential kind of literary criticism. The names associated with Marxist literary criticism are among the greatest in the field of critical theory: Adorno, Lukacs, Eagleton, Jameson, Williams, and my own personal Marxian guru, Louis Althusser.
If you are going to write an English term paper using Marxist literary criticism you first have to understand its origins. Although Marxist criticism has branched off into various schools of thought, it all traces back to the influential writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The economic theories of these two men were outlined in a series of manuscripts with the most useful for their application to literary criticism being Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, The German Ideology, andThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Despite what you learned in school, or in church, or on television, or at the movies, or in popular novels, or on the radio Marx and Engels did not propose a totalitarian state marked by brutal suppression and imperialistic aims. The theories of Marx and Engels are situated within the realm of economics, suggesting that history has been shaped through the struggle of the working class to achieve equality and fairness. The history of the world has been one of dynamic change from the principles of aristocracy and feudalism to capitalism and socialism. Capitalism, they observed, is a system in which the majority of people work to produce goods and services but do not share equally in the benefits of their labor with the ruling class who own the means of production. Capitalism reproduces itself and keeps the exploited working class from rising up and overthrowing a system designed to exploit and alienate them not through the brutality of totalitarianism but rather by institutional naturalization of the process via religion, the legal system, the educational system, and the government. What Marx and Engels could not have foreseen was the extraordinary influence of the media in perpetuating the idea that capitalism is the way things are supposed to be. The naturalization and mass acceptance of untruths is a necessary component in transforming ideology into a state-sponsored system; unless, of course, you can make people do what you want through sheer force.
When writing a literary critique using Marxist theory, one must engage the work of literature as a product of the ideology under which it was written. Ideology is essentially nothing more complicated than a series of concepts or ideas that are engendered by the ruling class as a normality that should remain unchallenged. A Marxist critique typically views any work of literature as being shaped by the distortions of prevailing ideology under which they were conceived. All writers express subconscious influences of the ideology that shapes their ideas and opinions. In addition, most are conscious at some level of the influence of ideology and this is usually expressed in one of two ways: either the writer willing reproduces the ideology, or else he attempts to subvert it. The goal of applying Marxist criticism to literature to is discover the influence of historic class struggle and economic determinism.
In this way, Marxist theory can actually be applied to works of literature that were written well before Marx ever appeared on the scene. For instance, William Shakespeare’s tragedy of King Lear is most often viewed through as a domestic dispute with angry daughters exacting revenge for not being dear old dad’s favorite. In fact, it is quite easy to apply a Marxist critique to the play. From a Marxist perspective, King Lear is really about the outdated feudal system coming into conflict with a new economic system that promises more equality for the disenfranchised working class. Lear himself is the representative of the old system and Edmund the Bastard represents the new. That both men die can be read as a Hegelian synthesis that is created when the thesis and antithesis come into conflict. The key component in this analysis is understanding that what motivates the actions of Edmund is his awareness of the unfairness of a system that cheats a clearly superior intellect out of enjoying the economic fruits of inheritance simply because he is illegitimate. (Of course, one could also quite easily attack this from a psychoanalytical perspective based on the palpable Oedipal overtones to Edmund as he betrays various father-figures and beds their wives.)
Once you get it, it is relatively easy to apply Marxist criticism to any work of literature from song lyrics to screenplays. The reason it is so easy is because Marx was so right. Economic determinism has been a force for historical evolution since the first caveman tried to tell another he was the owner of that nice big cave at the end of the street and charge him rent for it. Class struggle is the only absolute that has existed throughout history and once you begin to understand how these forces influence society it actually becomes fun to see how far you can go to use them. Marxist critical theory can and has been used for term papers on everything from ancient Greek drama to SpongeBob SquarePants. (Mr. Krabs presents a mother lode of potential for examining the exploitation of the working class by the ruling elite who own the means of the production and SpongeBob’s obliviously happy status as exploited worker makes for a fantastic comment on contemporary methods of distracting workers from the fact that they are being exploited.) For an example of how to write a Marxist critique, please see my article that applies Marxist theory to the movie Jaws.
The most important thing to remember when writing a literary term paper using Marxist criticism is that the most important element to discover is the effect that economic standing has on the characters. Marxist theory is all about people making life decisions because of economic conditions. Try to figure out how the economic conditions under which characters live affect their actions and behavior. Marxist theory essentially posits the notion that almost all literature that is produced under any system will be shaped by that system’s ideology and will therefore not present any real challenge to the basic shared beliefs and assumptions of that that ideology. The contradiction in capitalism, of course, is that profit is valued above all else and if a dissenting opinion can prove profitable it will sneak into the mix. To counter the adverse effects of this, however, the full extent of the ruling power will be applied to countering the basic concepts of that dissent with the purpose of distilling it into acceptable forms.
