Marxist Criticism (Lectures in Literary Theory)

What do capitalism and class struggle have to do with analyzing literature? Watch and find out! This video is not an argument for or against Marxism, but simply a presentation of Marxist ideas as I understand them, especially those which are relevant to the criticism of literature and culture and which have contributed to the vocabulary of theory and criticism. This video, based on years of lecturing in a second-year course called "Critical Approaches to Literature," is intended for students and learners who are relatively new to Marxist ideas. It introduces some basic Marxist concepts and surveys the development of Marxist critical thought in the 20th century with attention to some key figures, but also has some gaps (Walter Benjamin, Marxism and psychonanalysis). Table of Contents: 00:00 - Introduction 01:33 - My goals: education, not persuasion 02:26 - Who was Karl Marx? 03:44 - Marxism and Literature: Why? 04:16 - I. Marxism: Definition and Origins 06:41 - Marx's Theory of History 12:39 - II. Key Ideas of Classical Marxism 12:56 - Hegelian Dialectic and Materialism 16:49 - Four Key Marxist Ideas 17:25 - 1: Labor Theory of Value 19:09 - 2: Alienation of Labor 20:59 - 3: Commodity fetish 23:51 - 4: Base and Superstructure 24:48 - Summary: Ideas and Material Conditions 25:58 - Ideology according to Marxism 28:36 - The Crisis of Marxism in the 20th C. 30:34 - III. Neo-Marxism and Critical theory 30:56 - Marxist Literary Criticism: Core Methods 34:28 - Mikhail Bakhtin 39:39 - Antonio Gramsci 43:34 - The Frankfurt School 49:18 - Louis Althusser 52:52 - IV. Academic Marxism in the West 53:35 - Raymond Williams 58:40 - Fredric Jameson 1:02:53 - Terry Eagleton 1:04:24 - Race, Gender, and Ethnic Studies 1:08:15 - Is Critical Race Theory Marxism? 1:09:29 - How to Read Like a Marxist Critic 1:14:00 - Concluding thoughts! Basic Bibliography • Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels) The Communist Manifesto, 1848; Das Kapital, 1867; "Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions" from The German Ideology, 1932; "On Greek Art in Its Time" from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859 • Leon Trotsky - "Literature and Revolution," 1923 • Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, 1925-1939 (published later) • Georg Lukács "The Ideology of Modernism," 1956 • M.M. Bakhtin, “Discourse of the Novel” (1935), various others • Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," 1936 • Theodor W. Adorno, various • Louis Althusser, Reading Capital (1965); “Ideology and ISAs” (1970) • Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, Criticism and Ideology, 1976 • Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, 1971 • Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (1989)