Marxist Literary Criticism Essay -- Literature Essays Literary Critici

While literary critics do start to elaborate or develop ideas articulated by Karl Marx, it is important and prerequisite to make a distinction between Marxs specific socio-economic and political docket and the body of literary theory which emerged years later. Marxist literary rebuke proceeds from the fundamental philosophical assumption that consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence...Life is not de callined by consciousness, but consciousness by life (Marx 568-9). Marxist critics use this challenge to the notion of an innate, prefigured, person human nature to reexamine the nature of creative or literary authority. Power seems to reside outside or beyond the bounds of humanity. preferably than dipping into a world of universal forms or expressing a subjective interior, artists and their make are determined by the web of power relations in which they exist literature is thus inescapably tethered to a continuum of socio-political concerns. Hegemony is the term most often used by Marxist critics to describe this continually renegotiat...