[PDF] Formalism And Marxism eBook

Author : Tony Bennett
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 35,51 MB
Release : 2004-03-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1134356684

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Russian Formalism and Marxist criticism had a seismic impact on twentieth-century literary theory and the shockwaves are still felt today. First published in 1979, Tony Bennett's Formalism and Marxism created its own reverberations by offering a ground-breaking new interpretation of the Formalists' achievements and demanding a new way forward in Marxist criticism. The author first introduces and reviews the work of the Russian Formalists, a group of theorists who made an extraordinarily vital contribution to literary criticism in the decade followig the October Revolution of 1917. Placing the work of key figures in context and addressing such issues as aesthetics, linguistics and the category of literature, literary form and function and literary evolution, Bennett argues that the Formalists' concerns provided the basis for a radically historical approach to the study of literature. Bennett then turns to the situation of Marxist criticism ad sketches the risks it has run in becoming overly entangled with the concerns of traditional aesthetics. He forcefully argues that through a serious and sympathetic reassessment of the Formalists and their historical approach, Marxist critics might find their way back on to the terrain of politics, where they and theri work belong. Addressing such crucial questions as 'What is literature?' or 'How should it be studied and to what end?', Formalism and Marxism explores ideas which should be considered by any student or reader of literature and provides a particular challenge to those interested in Marxist criticism. Now with a new afterword, this classic text still offers the best available starting point for those new to the field, as well as representing a crucial intervention in twentieth-century literary theory.

Author : Anna Kornbluh
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 10,79 MB
Release : 2019-11-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 022665334X

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In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.

Author : John Frow
Publisher :
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 44,57 MB
Release : 1986-02-05
Category :
ISBN : 9780674332805

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Frow's book is a novel contribution to Marxist literary theory, proposing a reconciliation of formalism and historicism in order to establish the basis for a new literary history. Through a critique of his forerunners in Marxist theory, Frow seeks to define the strengths and the limitations of this tradition and then to extend its possibilities in a radical reworking of the concept of discourse.

Author : Terry Eagleton
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 100 pages
File Size : 21,36 MB
Release : 1976-08-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780520032439

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"Far and away the best short introduction to Marxist criticism (both history and problems) which I have seen."--Fredric R. Jameson "Terry Eagleton is that rare bird among literary critics--a real writer."--Colin McCabe, The Guardian

Author : John Frow
Publisher : Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 34,99 MB
Release : 1986
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN :

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John Frow's book is a novel contribution to Marxist literary theory, proposing a reconciliation of formalism and historicism in order to establish the basis for a new literary history. Through a critique of his forerunners in Marxist theory (the historicist Marxism of Lukács, the work of Macherey, Eagleton, and Jameson), Frow seeks to define the strengths and the limitations of this tradition and then to extend its possibilities in a radical reworking of the concept of discourse. He develops the notion of literature as a historically specific system within a network of discourses. Frow goes on to elaborate a number of central theoretical categories and to explore the historical dimension of those categories. Drawing in particular on Russian Formalism, he develops a theory of the dynamics of literary change and of the historical pressures that shape the literary system. He tests and extends his categories through readings of texts by Petronius, Hölderlin, DeLillo, Dickens, Frank Hardy, and others. The final chapter, a reading of Derrida and Foucault, poses the question of the possibility of setting limits to reading and the power of limits to determine literary history.

Author : Raymond Williams
Publisher : Oxford Paperbacks
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 42,41 MB
Release : 1977-11-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0198760612

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This classic study examines the place of literature within Marxist cultural theory, and offers an assessment of the contributions of previous thinkers to Marxist literary theory.

Author : Fredric Jameson
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 455 pages
File Size : 45,41 MB
Release : 2016-11-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1400884500

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For more than thirty years, Fredric Jameson has been one of the most productive, wide-ranging, and distinctive literary theorists in the United States and the Anglophone world. Marxism and Form provided a pioneering account of the work of the major European Marxist theorists--T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Jean-Paul Sartre--work that was, at the time, largely neglected in the English-speaking world. Through penetrating readings of each theorist, Jameson developed a critical mode of engagement that has had tremendous in.uence. He provided a framework for analyzing the connection between art and the historical circumstances of its making--in particular, how cultural artifacts distort, repress, or transform their circumstances through the abstractions of aesthetic form. Jameson's presentation of the critical thought of this Hegelian Marxism provided a stark alternative to the Anglo-American tradition of empiricism and humanism. It would later provide a compelling alternative to poststructuralism and deconstruction as they became dominant methodologies in aesthetic criticism. One year after Marxism and Form, Princeton published Jameson's The Prison-House of Language (1972), which provided a thorough historical and philosophical description of formalism and structuralism. Both books remain central to Jameson's main intellectual legacy: describing and extending a tradition of Western Marxism in cultural theory and literary interpretation.

Author : Tony Bennett
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 326 pages
File Size : 23,1 MB
Release : 2005-06-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1134983050

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First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.