The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature
Citation
Contents
PART I: The Literary Representation of Class
- A Marxian Imagination
- Class in Dickens from Hard Times to Little Dorrit
- Representing Class in the Realist Novel
PART II: Some Consequences for Critical Theory and Practice
- “Socialism-Anxiety”: The Princess Casamassina and Its New York Critics
- The Gramscian Ordeal of Meridel Le Sueur
- Denying the Imagination in Marxian Cultural Studies: Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson
CODA: Imagining History in The Poisonwood Bible
Author
is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University, Columbus, and the author of The Pillar of the World: “Antony and Cleopatra” in Shakespeare’s Development and Melville and the Politics of Identity: From “King Lear” to “Moby Dick”.
Context
In the trio of critical concepts — gender, race and class — that often recur within academic discourse, the notion of class is rarely paid more than lipservice. This is partly because both gender and race, while primarily being a focus of oppression, can also be celebrated positively as a locus of identity. Class relations, in contrast, always involve conditions of inequality, exploitation and expropriation. The issue of class in the final analysis also poses the question of power: who rules?This is also due to the fact that class in literature raises questions about class-consciousness, the social function of writing and the ideology of the text hardly favorite postmodern issues.
Thesis
Where earlier theorists have treated class as a fixed identity site, Markels sees class in more dynamic terms, as a process of accumulation involving many, often conflicting, sites of identity. Rather than examining the situations and characters explicitly identified in class terms, this makes it possible to see how racial and gender identities are caught up in the processes of accumulation that define class. Markels shows how a Marxian imagination is at work in a range of great literary works, often written by non-Marxists.
Methodology
Key Terms
imagination:
Another difficult problem, which this book addresses, is that of the nature of ideology. How for instance does ideology impact the daily lives of ordinary people? Raymond Williams, one of Markels’ s prime sources of critical inspiration, famously suggested the term ‘structures of feeling’ to capture this elusive relationship between life and ideas. Ideology is, according to Williams, a continuum of past, present and future, a subjective mixture of residual, dominant and emergent thoughts and emotions that affect our individual and social behavior. In his own more dialectical view of ideology that moves away from Williams’ ’empiricist subsumption of literature to sociology’ (114), Markels locates this most slippery of concepts within the imagination, in how we make sense of the world.
Criticisms and Questions
Notes
-the litmus test of realism is, rightly, the fictional representation of working-class characters. In many of the social novels discussed in the book, this involves either dull, slice-of-life versions of fictional reportage or the similarly reductive caricaturing of workers as either helpless victims of poverty or stainless steel proletarian heroes.
- On the understanding of class as a historically structured, socially invisible, overdetermined process of transient expropriation, I argue that the representation of class requires the abstracting power of imagination… Not being directly visible, this process can only be represented indirectly, and its indirect manifestations need to be represented with sufficient variety and scope to produce a literary structure through whose point of entry class is overtly thematized and not left to be retrieved from a political unconscious. (21)
-The circus in Hard Times represents just such an escapist alternative to the irreconcilability of class interest. In Little Dorrithowever, Markels argues, Dickens’ s potential as a revolutionary writer is fully realized through his clear and uncompromising image of capitalism as a prisonhouse of expropriation, both for the individual and for society as a whole.
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