Marxism: English Literature

Define productive forces as human labor, tools, machines, and knowledge. Describe relations of production and ownership, and explain mode of production as their combined structure across feudal, asiatique, and capitalist.

Explore use value, exchange value, and surplus value. Learn how labor makes commodities exchangeable and how costs create surplus value, guiding why capital seeks cheap labor.

Analyze fixed and variable expenditure under capitalism, and how labor creates value and surplus value through the transformation of raw materials into commodities.

Marx presents a humanistic view, centering labor and the naturally productive human. He posits a subject with inherent drive to create, seeking remedies to reconcile labor with the true self.

Explain base and superstructure as parts of Marx's architectural model, where the base—the mode of production—shapes law, ideology, and state, with circular relationship where the base can determine the superstructure.

Examine the marxist epistemological model of ideology, where the dominant ideology hides workers' exploitation through the superstructure and education as an ideological state apparatus reproduces class hierarchies.

Explore Marx's humanist view of productive beings and how capitalism yields alienated labor, with monotonous work that blocks creativity. Compare estrangement to alienation as a more important concept in capitalism.

Examine Marxist literary criticism by tracing history as class struggle and how material conditions shape consciousness. Explore base and superstructure, ideology, alienation, and hegemony in literary readings.

Examine how Marxist criticism reveals a text's hidden ideology, class conflicts, and which workers, audiences, and positions it represents, with The Jungle and God's Bits of Works as examples.

Explain how dominance and hegemony shape regimes, using Gramsci's prison notebooks to show force, police power, cultural consent, education, and ideological state apparatuses.

Examine Gramsci's organic and foundational intellectuals, showing how organic intellectuals align with oppressed groups to mobilize knowledge, while foundational intellectuals serve the dominant order and neutrality sustains it.

Explore reading the silences of a text through Pierre Macherey's theory, analyzing absence, unspoken assumptions, and ideological underpinnings to reveal what the text takes for granted.