Christopher Craig on Marxism

It was a great learning experience having Christopher Craig guest lecture this week. His thoughts on ideology helped me to better relate the topics in class to current day happenings. Although i have studied the ideas of Marxism before this class, each time I come across information about the topic I can still pick out new pieces of information to process. I especially agreed with the beginning of the lecture that talked about the copy of Marx’s Communist Manifesto that was found as decor for some trendy clothing store. I've seen other examples of this and i just don't get it. As said in the lecture, the innitial drawing point to the Manifesto is because of its aesthetically pleasing appearance, however the deeper meaning ties the ideals of the Manifesto to the ideals of the trendy clothing store which innitially sounds like an oxymoron. Its almost as if the store is convincing you that maybe you don't know what you're ideals are, but by purchasing our line of clothing you'll stand for something that looks important enough. Which is not necessarily true.

Also i found the lecture to be most interesting towards the end when he mentioned that as readers we are not considering how repressive the text is due to the power of the dominant class. Once that repression becomes apparent it is easier to see through the ruling class ideology and grasp our own ideals.

Marxist Criticism vs. Liberal Humanism

If liberal humanism means to look at a text without any bias and without any deeper meaning, then in my opinion this view of literature differs greatly from that of Marxist Criticism. Within Marxist Criticism literature is seen as a product result of history and culture with economic, political, and social circumstances, and after some class discussion I have found that each point of the "ten tenets of liberal humanism" has a contrasting idea to what is recognized as the general view of a Marxist Critic.

The idea within the third tenet is a good example of this. The idea here is that literature must be studied in isolation, and all that is needed is the text that is in front of you, no prior experiences necessary. A Marxist Critic would say that the text has come to be from experiences of history and culture, so those past experiences are necessary to have in order to fully understand a text.

I believe it is necessary to have some past experiences in order to fully understand a text. No matter how hard we may try to put personal bias aside we each have had individual experiences which lead us to follow a text in our own personal way.

An Introduction...

Let me start off by introducing myself, lizzie_spring, as an English Communications major at a liberal arts college located in the lovely city of Boston. As a first time blogger I look forward to new found information and the wide variety of comments that await.

This semester in particular I will be studying more literature to further my knowledge as to what it means to be a literary critic. With that it must be mentioned that I will also be focusing in on "theory" and its impact on literary critics and their analysis of literature.

The different ways in which literature is studied and how those ways came to be are my initial thoughts on "theory". But after registering for a semester long class on the subject I know it can't possibly be that simple. I look forward to learning more specifically about the many different perspectives of theory inclusive of Marxism, structuralism, and feminist criticism. More to follow...