Pandya Chandani : Marxist, Ecocritical Feminist and Queer Criticism

Marxist, Ecocritical Feminist and Queer Criticism

Hello Readers!

Today I'm going to write about four critical theories that Marxist, Ecocriticism, Feminist and Queer Criticism this thinking activity given by our Professor Dr. Dilip Barad Sir..so let's see...

Marxist Theory:

Introduction

Marxism can be defined as a set of theories (mostly political and social), a system of thought and analysis formulated by Karl Marx, a German philosopher who lived in the nineteenth century. These theories had tremendous political, social and literary influence during a major part of the twentieth century. Marxism still retains an aura of past glory though as a political system its future has become bleak after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The basic aim of Marxism is to correct the evils of capitalism such as political and economic inequalities in society. This aim it hopes to achieve by overthrowing capitalism and bringing in socialism.

Marxism is not a simple doctrine as may seem from the above statements. Rather, it is a complicated doctrine with three dimensions in Philosophy, History and Economics.

a. Marxism and Philosophy

As a movement in Philosophy, Marxism is much indebted to the doctrines of Hegel, Kant and other German philosophers. Based on their theories, Marx evolved a new branch of philosophy called Dialectical Materialism. According to this, all political / historical events in the world have their base in the conflict of social forces. These social forces originate from man’s material needs.

b. Marxism and History

Marxism opens a new way called Historical Materialism to understand History. According to this, historical or social changes happen not because of any non-human or super-human force like God or destiny but these changes are caused by man’s material culture. By material culture, Marx means the tools, objects and other materials man use in their daily lives. These tools are also described as “instruments of production”. Marx believes that the modes of production in a society decide its organization into different social groups.

Marx views capitalism as a mode of production that emerged from medieval feudalism. Like feudalism, capitalism is also an unjust system. Exploitation of the poor and working class is inbuilt in the system. Marx believes that capitalism will collapse because of its internal contradictions. It will give way to socialism and to a higher form of socialism called communism. When communism is achieved all social changes will end and there will be no more injustice in the world.

According to Marxism, History is a struggle between the working class (proletariat) and the capitalists. In between these two groups stand the middle class (bourgeoisie), which identifies itself with the capitalists. But the middle class has neither control over the mode of production nor any share in the profits.

The Marxist tenets can be summarized thus:

1. All political and historical events are the result of the conflict of social forces, which are based on man’s material needs.

2. The mode of production determines historical and social changes.

3. All recorded history is a history of class-struggle

4. Capitalism originates from feudalism. Capitalism will give way to socialism, which will reach a higher stage in communism. This will put an end to exploitation and class struggle.

5. Art (Literature), science and religion are mere ‘superstructures’. Their ‘base’ is in economics.

2 Marxism and Literature

Chernyshevsky, who lived before Marx laid the foundation of Marxist theory on literature. He developed a purely materialistic view of art that placed art subordinate to reality. He believed that the highest beauty is that which man sees in the world and not that which is created by art. He viewed art only as an empty amusement. The basic premise of Marx’s view on art is not much different. Marx views art as subordinate to society. It is just “one of the forms of social consciousness”. Marx also believes that “art is not created in a vacuum”. It needs a society for its existence.

Marx and Engels authored another work – The German Ideology (1845 –46) – that brings out some other important concepts of Marxism; especially connected to ideology. The dominant ideology of any period is the product of the socio-economic structure of that period. That is to say, ideology originates from class-relations and class-interests. Ideology is a ‘superstructure’ with its ‘base’ in contemporary economic system. Literature is part of the cultural ideology and therefore it is only a ‘superstructure’.

Who are the “Vulgar Marxists”?

Elsewhere the role of “Vulgar Marxists” in distorting Marxism is mentioned. With Stalinism reigning unchallenged in the Soviet Union these group of Marxist theoreticians began to lay down rules and principles for creative writing. For example, in an article called “The Crisis in Criticism” in the ` New Masses` of February 1933, Granville Hicks drew up a list of requirements, which the ideal Marxist work of literature should possess. The primary function of such a work must be “to lead the proletarian reader to recognize his role in the class struggle”. Therefore it must (1) ‘directly or indirectly show the effects of the class struggle’; (2) ‘the author must be able to make the reader feel that he is participating in the lives described ‘ and finally, (3) the author’s point of view must be that of the vanguard of the proletariat. This formula, according to Hicks, will help us to recognize the perfect Marxian novel’ – and adds – ‘no novel as yet written perfectly conforms to our demands’.

Similar attempts by the “Vulgar Marxists” to put creative writing in a straight jacket earned a bad name to Marxism. Marxism began to be looked upon as a crude theory because of the utterances of such dogmatic critics like Hicks. Fortunately, the ideological dictatorship of the “Vulgar Marxists” did not last long and good sense and taste returned to Marxist studies with critics like Christopher Caudwell and Edmund Wilson whom we can call liberal Marxists.

Louis Althusser assimilated the principles of structuralism into the Marxist theory.

The structure of society as a whole is constituted by diverse social formations or “ideological state apparatuses”.

Religious, legal, literary and political institutions are part of the ideological state apparatus.

Ideology vary according to the form and practices of each mode of state apparatus and the ideology of each mode operates by means of a discourse which ‘interpellates’ the individual to take up a pre-established ‘subject position’.

A great work is not a mere product of ideology, for its fiction establishes for the reader a distance from which to recognize the ideology from which it is born.

What Marxist critics do

1. They make a division between the 'overt' (manifest or surface) and 'covert' (latent or hidden) content of a literary work (much as psychoanalytic critics do) and then relate the covert subject matter of the literary work to basic Marxist themes, such as class struggle, or the progression of society through various historical stages, such as, the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism. Thus, the conflicts in King Lear might be read as being 'really' about the conflict of class interest between the rising class (the bourgeoisie) and the falling class (the feudal overlords).

2. Another method used by Marxist critics is to relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author. In such cases an assumption is made (which again is similar to those made by psychoanalytic critics) that the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in the text.

3. A third Marxist method is to explain the nature of a whole literary genre in terms of the social period which 'produced' it. For instance, The Rise of the Novel, by Ian Watt, relates the growth of the novel in the eighteenth century to the expansion of the middle classes during that period. The novel 'speaks' for this social class, just as, for instance, Tragedy 'speaks for' the monarchy and the nobility, and the Ballad 'speaks for' for the rural and semi-urban 'working class'.

4. A fourth Marxist practice is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is 'consumed', a strategy which is used particularly in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism.

Queer Theory

Queer Theory is field of critical theory that emerged in early 1990s. Feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of essential self and upon gay and lesbian studies close examination of the society constructed nature of sexual act and identities. Feminism was contrast between sex and gender - Queer Theory offers the view that all identities are social construction.

What is Queer Theory

An approach to literary and cultural studies that rejected traditional categories of gender and sexuality critical theory that emerged in 1990s. It is not only sexual desire but it is emotional desire. Queer Theory does not concern itself exclusively with homosexuality - it is about all forms of identity.

What lesbian/gay critic do?

1. Identify lesbian/gay episodes in mainstream work and discuss them as such (for example, the relationship between Jane and Helen in Jane Eyre), rather than reading same-sex pairings in non-specific ways, for instance, as symbolising two aspects of the same character (Zimmerman).

2 . Set up an extended, metaphorical sense of 'lesbian/gay' so that it connotes a moment of crossing a boundary, or blurring a set of categories. All such 'liminal' moments mirror the moment of selfidentification as lesbian or gay, which is necessarily an act of conscious resistance to established norms and boundaries.

Examples

Dickson Experimental Sound film.

Nineteenth century and in the mid 1930s and 40s, Hollywood saw its queer characters as nothing but flamboyant, laughing stocks who were just there to establish a twitchy note within the films. Conventional sexual behaviour between the same sexes was not accepted on the silver screen and was only used to typify homosexuality as a mental illness. “Sissy” looking man or the “hardboiled” woman in a film came only to enrich the negativity as perceived by the white Christian middle class culture.

Feminism :-

Feminism is one of the most recent ideologies to emerge, although its origins canbe traced far back into history. We examine its historical roots and identify anddiscuss the different forms of feminism that have developed over the last twocenturies. We then link feminism with other ideologies and conclude with acritique and assessment of feminism in the modern world.

Feminism is a relatively new ideology, dating, for all practical purposes, from the late eighteenth century. Three ‘waves’ of feminism can be detected. The ﬁrst, of about 1830–1930, was concerned chieﬂy with legal and political rights. The second, in the 1960s and 1970s, focused on much more funda-mental personal and relationship issues. The ‘third wave’ in the last decade or so has been essentially a reﬂection on and reappraisal of what has been achieved. Feminism is different from other ideologies in that it largely ignores or takes for granted much of what other ideologies are concerned with. Even more signiﬁcantly it denies the boundaries between the ‘private’ and ‘public’spheres. The key target of feminism is ‘patriarchy ’ – male domination in all its myriad forms. Feminism can, however, be divided into several different‘schools’ each with a distinctive focus – liberal, socialist, conservative and radical – that sit uneasily with each other. Critics of feminism have denied that it is really a distinctive ideology at all; the most sceptical have dismissed it as an indulgence of middle-class Westerners. Finally, unlike almost all other ideologies which eventually give birth to political parties, feminism has not done so. Its inﬂuence, at least in the West, has been enormous.

‘First-wave’ feminism

The ‘ﬁrst wave’ of feminism (roughly 1830–1930) was similar to other nineteenth-century political campaigns, such as Catholic emancipation or anti-slavery, in which women had been active. These early feminist philo- sophical arguments were translated into political movements that focused on property and divorce rights, and equality in voting rights.

In the USA the rights of man, spelt out in the Declaration of Independence, were an obvious starting point to argue for the rights of woman. A ‘National Women’s Suffrage Association’ was set up in 1869 to advance these rights. Political campaigns by women began later in Britain, but in 1903 the ‘Women’s Social and Political Union’ was formed to ﬁght for female suffrage. So was born the Suffragette movement.

‘Second-wave’ feminism

A radically new development occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called ‘second wave’ of feminism, inspired by such writers as Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1953), Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963), Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (1970) and, most famously, Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1970). It shifted the entire debate from what might be generally considered political to the psychological, cultural and anthropological ﬁelds. These explorations extended the women’s movement far outside the conventional bounds of political discourse and posed a formidable challenge to most basic assumptions of culture and civilisation. Women needed radical social change and political emancipation if they were to be ‘liberated’ from thousands of years of male oppression. Liberal and radical feminism agreed in their demand for both elements to improve women’s lot. Both equal rights legislation and considerable social change, especially in popular attitudes on gender issues, are needed to improve the lot of women and redress the power balance between men and women.

‘Third-wave’ feminism

By the 1990s some feminists argued that second-wave feminism was becoming rather dated. Major civil liberties and legal advances for women had occurred. Technological developments, such as the contraceptive pill and household labour-saving devices, had liberated women from the burdens of unplanned childbearing and the grind of housework that had held back earlier generations. Some of the major writers of second-wave feminism, such as Germaine Greer in Sex and Destiny (1985), became sympathetic to the impor- tance of family life and child rearing for women, while Camille Paglia, in Sex, Art and American Culture (1990), questioned the ‘victim’ status of women in much feminist writing. The 1990s, it was claimed by feminists of what might be called ‘third wave’ or ‘new’ feminism, was the time to consolidate what had been achieved. Women are still disadvantaged in many areas of life in modern societies, but the principle of female equality, now largely accepted and backed by legislation, needed to be made a stronger reality in practical rather than just theoretical terms. A number of issues of gender discrimination remain to be addressed: female pay in Britain remains, on average, around 75 per cent of male wages; women are more likely to be found in low-paid, part-time, low-status, insecure, low-skilled and temporary work than men are; few women are at the top of the major professions of law, medicine, academia, the media and the senior civil service. In addition, in 2001 40 per cent of the FTSE Index companies were identiﬁed as having no women on their board and the proportion of leading businesses with women on the board fell from 69 per cent in 1999 to 57 percent.