MARXIST CRITICISM 181
180 MALAPROPISM
But the genre also includes extended expressions of a complex evolution of fee-
' lingful thought, as in the long elegy and the meditative ode. And within a lyric,
the process of observation, thought, memory, and feeling is organized in a variety
of ways. For example, in "love lyrics" the speaker may simply express an enam-
ored state of mind in an ordered form, as in Robert Bums' "0 my love's like a
red, red rose," and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me manifest content: 290.
count the ways"; or may gallantly elaborate a compliment (Ben Jonson's "Drink
to me only with thine eyes"); or may deploy an argument to take advantage of manifesto: 213.
fleeting youth and opportunity (Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," or
manuscripts: 30.
Shakespeare's first seventeen sonnets addressed to a male youth); or may express
a cool response to an importunate lover (Christina Rossetti's "No, thank you, Marchen (mer shen): 125 .
John"). In other kinds of lyrics the speaker manifests and celebrates a particular
disposition and set of values Oohn Milton's "L' Allegro" and "n Penseroso"); or Marxis~
expresses a sustained process of observation and meditation in the attempt to re-
solve an emotional problem (Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality,"
Amold's "Dover Beach"); or is exhibited as making and justifying the choice of
a way oflife (yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium") .
In the original Greek, "lyric" signified a song rendered to the accompaniment
of a lyre . In some current usages, lyric still retains the sense of a poem written to
be set to music; the hymn, for example, is a lyric on a religious subject that is in-
tended to be sung. The adjectival form "lyrical" is sometimes applied to an ex-
pressive, song-like passage in a narrative poem, such as Eve's declaration of love
to Adam, "With thee conversing I forget all time," in Milton's Paradise Lost, IV,
639-56.
See genre for the broad distinction between the three major poetic classes of
drama, narrative (or epic), and lyric, and also for the sudden elevation oflyric, in
the Romantic period, to the status of the quintessentially poetic mode . For sub-
classes of the lyric, see aubade, dramatic monologue, elegy, epithalamion, hymn, ode,
sonnet. Refer to Nornun Maclean, "From Action to Image: Theories of the
Lyric in the 18th Century," in Critics and Criticism, ed. R . S. Crane (1952);
Maurice Bowra, Mediaeval Love-Song (1961) ; Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker,
eds., Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (1985); David Lindley, Lyric (1985) ; Helen
Vendler, The Music of What Happens (1988).
For references to lyric in other entries, see pages 134, 235, 336. For types
of lyric, see aubade; dramatic monologue; elegy; epithalamion; folk song; haiku; ode;
sonnet.
machinery (in an epic): 98; 37.
magazines: 333 .
magic realism: 232 .
malapropism: Malapropism is that type of solecism (the conspicuous and unin-
tended violation of standard diction or grammar) which mistakenly uses a word
in place of another that it resembles; the effect is usually comic. The term derives
from Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy The Rivals (1775),
who in .the ,~t~,empt to display a copious vocabulary said things such as "a progeny
of learnmg, as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile" d "h '
th . 1 f ' an e IS
e very,rmeapp eo politeness." In an early radio comedy "The Easy Aces," Jane
Ac.e, an mveterate malaproplst, remarked: "He got so excited, he ran around like a
chIcken wIth ItS hat off."
criticism: Marxist criticism, in its diverse forms, grounds its theory and
practICe on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx (1818-83) and his
fellow-thmker Fnednch Engels (1820-95), and especially on the following claims:
1. In the la~t analysis, the ~vo.lving history of humankind, of its social groupings
an.d relatIOns, of Its .mstltutIOns, and of its ways of thinking are largely deter-
mmed by t~e changmg mode of ItS "material production"-that is, of its over-
all econo~c orgamzatIOn for producing and distributing material goods.
2. Changes m the funda~ental mode of material production effect changes in the
class structure of a .soCIety, establishing in each era dominant and subordinate
classes that en~age m a. struggle for economic, political, and social advantage .
3. Human conscIOusness IS constituted by an ideology-that is the b li f -
lues, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human' beings ep : s, .va
and ~y recourse to which they explain, what they take to be reality. An r~~:~~
0lgy IS, m complex ways, the product of the position and interests of a particular
c .ass .. In any hlstoncal era, the dominant ideology embodies, and serves to le-
gltIrmze and perpetuate, the interests of the dominant economic and s 'al
class. OCI
Ideology was not much discussed by Marx and Engels after The Ge
.Ideology,
M 'whIch, . they
. rman
wrote jointly in 1845-46 ' but it ha s b ecome a k ey concept
m arxIst CntI~ISm of literature and the other arts. Marx inherited the term
from French philosophers of the late eighteenth century who us'e d I't t d '
the stud f h h ' 0 eSlgnate
. y 0 t e way t at all general concepts develop from particular sense
perceptions.
w ' fIni the present era, "ideology" is used in a van'ety 0 f non- M arxIst '
d:Ys, r~n~ng ~m a dero.gatory name for any set of political ideas that are held
th.~aoc hY an apph~d ngorously, to a neutral name for ways of perceiving and
m . ng t at are specIfic to an individual's race sex nationality educao'
ethmc group . In 1'ts d"IstmctIve
. 1y Marxist use the" reigm'ng I'de, l' on, or.
, d b 1. ' 0 ogy m any era IS
conceIve to. e, u tImately, the product of its economic structure and the result-
mg class relatIOns and class interests. In a famed architectural m t h M
represented
. . Ideology as a "superstructure" 0 f W h IC' h th e a p socioeco-
e concurrent or, arx
nOmIC system IS the "base." Friedrich Engels described ideology as "a false

182 MARXIST CRITICISM
consciousness," and many later Marxists consider it to be constituted largely by
. unconscious prepossessions that are illusory, in contrast to the "scientific" (that is,
Marxist) knowledge of the economic determinants, historical evolution, and
present constitution of the social world. A further claim is that, in t~e era of
capitalist economic organization that emerged in the West dunng the elghteenth
century, the reigning ideology incorporates the interests of the dominant and
exploitative class, the "bourgeoisie," who own the means of productlon and
distribution, as opposed to the "proletariat," or wage-earning working class. Thls
ideology, it is claimed, to those who live in and with it, seems a natural and
inevitable way of seeing, explaining, and dealing with the environing world, but
in fact has the hidden function of legitimizing and maintaining the position,
power, and economic interests of the ruling class. Bourge~is ideology is regarded
as both producing and permeating the social and cultural InstltutlOns, behefs,. and
practices of the present era-including religion, morality, philosophy, pohtlcs,
and the legal system, as well as (although in a less dlrect way) hterature and the
other arts.
In accordance with some version of the views just outlined, a Marxist critic
typically undertakes to explain the literature in any historical era, not as works cre-
ated in accordance with timeless artistic criteria, but as "products" of the eco-
nomic and ideological determinants specific to that era. What some Marxist critics
themselves decried as "vulgar Marxism" analyzed a "bourgeois" literary work as in
direct correlation with the present stage of the class struggle and demanded that
such works be replaced by a "social realism" that would represent the true reality
and progressive forces of our time; in practice, this usually turned out to be the
demand that literature conform to an official party line. More flexible Marxists,
on the other hand, building upon scattered comments on literature in Marx and
Engels themselves, grant that traditional literary works possess a degree of auton-
omy that enables some of them to transcend the prevailing bourgeois ideology
sufficiently to represent (or in the frequent Marxist equivalent, to reflect) aspects
of the "objective" reality of their time . (See imitation.)
The Hungarian thinker Georg Lukacs, one of the most widely influential of
Marxist critics, represents such a flexible view of the role of ideology. He pro-
posed that each great work ofliterature creates "its own world," which is unique
and seemingly distinct from "everyday reality." But masters of realism in the novel
such as Balzac or Tolstoy, by "bringing to life the greatest possible richness of the
objective conditions of life," and by creating "typical" characters who manifest the
essential tendencies and determinants of their epoch, succeed-often "in opposi-
tion to [the author's) own conscious ideology"-in producing a fictional world
which is a "reflection of life in the greatest concreteness and clarity and with all
its motivating contradictions." That is, the fictional world of such great writers
accords with the Marxist conception of the real world as constituted by class con-
flict, economic and social "contradictions," and the alienation of the individual
under capitalism. (See bourgeois epic, under epic, and refer to Georg Lukacs, Writer
and Critic and Other Essays, trans. 1970; the volume also includes Lukacs' useful
review of the foundational tenets of Marxist criticism, in "Marx and Engels on
Aesthetics. ")
MARXIST CRITICISM 183
While lauding nineteenth-century literary realism, Lukacs attacked modernist
experimental writers as "decadent" instances of concern with the subjectivity of
the alienated individual in the fragmented world of our late stage of capitalism.
(See modernism.) He thereby inaugurated a vigorous debate among Marxist critics
about the political standing of formal innovators in twentieth-century literature.
In opposition to Lukacs, the Frankfurt School of German Marxists, especially
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, lauded modernist writers such as James
Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Beckett, proposing that their formal experi-
ments, by the very fact that they fragment and disrupt the life they "reflect," es-
tablish a distance and detachment that serve as an implicit critique-or yield a
"negative knowledge"-of the dehumanizing institutions and processes of society
under capitalism. Adomo and Horkheimer attempted, after World War II, to ex-
plain "why humanity, instead of entering into a truly human condition" (as
Marxists had predicted) "is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." See the entry
critique, and refer to The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and
Eike Gebhardt (1982), and for an authoritative history of the Frankfurt School,
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (1996).
Two rather maverick German Marxists, Bertolt Brecht and Waiter Benjamin,
who also supported modernist and nonrealistic art, have had considerable influ-
ence on non-Marxist as well as Marxist criticism. In his critical theory, and in his
own dramatic writings (see epic theater), Bertolt Brecht rejected what he called the
"Aristotelian" concept that a tragic play is an imitation of reality, with a unified
plot and a universal theme that establishes an identification of the audience with
the hero and produces a catharsis of the spectator's emotions. (See Aristotle, under
tragedy and plot.) Brecht proposes instead that the illusion of reality should be de-
liberately shattered by an episodic plot, by protagonists who do not attract the audi-
ence's sympathy, by a striking theatricality in staging and acting, and by other ways
of baring the artifice of drama so as to produce an "alienation effect" (see under dis-
tance and involvement). The result of such alienation, Brecht asserts, will be to jar audi-
ences out of their passive acceptance of modern capitalist society as a natural way of
hfe, Into an attltude not only (as in Adorno) of critical understanding of capitalist
shortcomings, but of active cooperation with the forces of change.
Another notable critic, Walter Benjamin, was both an admirer of Brecht and
briefly an associate of the Frankfurt School. Particularly influential was Benjamin's
attentlon to the effects of changing material conditions in the production of the
arts, especially the recent developments of the mass media that have promoted he
said, "a revol~tionary criticism of traditional concepts of art." In his essay "The
Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin proposes that
modem technical innovations such as photography, the phonograph, the radio,
and especially the cinema, have transformed the very concept and status of a
w~rk of art. Formerly an artist or author produced a work which was a single
object, regarded as the speClal preserve of the bourgeois elite, around which de-
veloped a quasi-religious "aura" of uniqueness, autonomy, and aesthetic value in-
dependent of any social function-an aura which invited in the spectator a passive
attltude of absorbed contemplation in the object itself (See aestheticism.) The new
medla not only make possible the infinite and precise reproducibility of the

184 MARXIST CRITICISM
objects of art, but effect the production of works which, like the motion pictures,
. are specifically designed to be reproduced in multiple copies. Such modes of art,
Benjamin argues, by destroying the mystique of the unique work of art as a sub-
ject for pure contemplation, make possible a radical role for works of art by open-
ing the way to "the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art."
(Benjamin's writings are available in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols.,
2002-04. Useful collections of essays by the Marxist critics Luk:ics, Brecht,
Adorno, and Horkheimer are R . Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and Politics, 1977; and
Roger S. Gotdieb, ed., An Anthology of Western Marxism : From Lukacs and
Gramsci to Socialist-Feminism, 1989.)
The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of Marxist
criticism, marked by an openness, on some level of literary analysis, to other cur-
rent critical perspectives; a flexibility which acknowledges that Marxist critical the-
ory is itself, at least to some degree, an evolving historical process; a subtilizing of
the concept of ideology as applied to literary content; and a tendency to grant an
increased role to nonideological and distinctively artistic determinants of literary
structures and values.
In the 1960s the influential French Marxist Louis Althusser assimilated the
structuralism then current into his view that the structure of society is not a
monolithic whole, but is constituted by a diversiry of "nonsynchronous" social
fornutions, or "ideological state apparatuses," including religious, legal, political,
and literary institutions. Each of these possesses a "relative autonomy"; only "in
the last instance" is the ideology of a particular institution determined by its ma-
terial base in contemporary economic production. In an influential reconsidera-
tion of the general nature of ideology, Althusser opposes its definition as simply
"false consciousness." He declares instead that the ideology of each mode, of state
apparatus is different, and operates by means of a discourse which interpellates
(calls upon) the individual to take up a pre-established "subject position"-that
is, a position as a person with certain views and values, which, however, in every
instance serve the ultimate interests of the ruling class. (See discourse and subject
under poststructuralism.) Althusser affirms, furthermore, that a great work of liter-
ature is not a mere product of ideology, because its fiction establishes for the
reader a distance from which to recognize, hence expose, "the ideology from
which it is born . . . from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it
alludes." Pierre Macherey, in A Theory of Literary Production (1966, trans. 1978),
stressed the supplementary claim that a literary text not only distances itself from
its ideology by its fiction and form, but also exposes the "contradictions" that are
inherent in that ideology by its "silences" or "gaps"-that is, by what the text
fails to say because its inherent ideology makes it impossible to say it.
Combining Marxism and Freudianism, Macherey asserts that such textual "ab-
sences" are symptoms of ideological repressions of the contents in the text's own
"unconscious." The aim of Marxist criticism, Macherey asserts, is to make these
silences "speak" and so to reveal, behind what an author consciously intended to
say, the text's unconscious content-that is, its repressed awareness of the flaws,
stresses, and incoherence in the very ideology that it incorporates. (See hermeneu-
tics of suspicion.)
MARXIST CRITICISM 185
Between 1929 and 1935 the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, while im-
prisoned by the fascist government, wrote approximately thirty documents on
political, social, and cultural subjects, known as the "prison notebooks." Gramsci
maintains the original Marxist distinction between the economic base and the
cultural superstructure, but replaces the claim that culture is a disguised "reflec-
tion" of the material base with the concept that the relationship between the
two is one of "reciprocity," or interactive influence. Gramsci places special em-
phasis on the popular, as opposed to the elite elements of culture, ranging from
folklore and popular music to the cinema. Grarnsci's most widely echoed concept
is that of hegemony: that a social class achieves a predominant influence and
power, not by direct and overt means, but by succeeding in making its ideological
views so pervasive that the subordinate classes unwittingly accept and participate in
their own oppression. The concept of hegemony, unlike the classical Marxist con-
ception of ideology, implies an openness to negotiation and exchange, as well as
conflict, between classes, and so refashions Marxist categories to fit a modem,
post-industrial society in which diverse concepts and ideas, apart from "modes of
production," play a leading role. Another appealing feature of Gramsci's thought
to recent theorists is his emphasis on the role of intellectuals and opinion makers
in helping people understand how they can effect their own transformation.
Especially since Gramsci's prison writings began to be translated into English in
1971, they have had a strong influence on literary and social critics such as Terry
Eagleton in England and Fredric Jameson and Edward Said in America, who
argue for the power of literary culture to intervene in and transform existing eco-
nomic and political arrangements and activities. (See Gramsci, Selections from
Cultural Writings, trans. William Boelhower, 1985; David Forgacs, ed., The
Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916--1935, 2000; Chantal Mouffe, ed.,
Gramsci and Marxist Theory, 1979.)
Grarnsci's writings also inspired a number of post-Marxist thinkers, who
sought to adapt Marxism to poststructural discourse. Among these was a leader of
the British Cultural Studies movement, Stuart Hall. (See cultural studies, also cultural
materialism under the entry new historicism.) Hall insisted that ideology must not be
considered a "false consciousness" or kind of concealment, but rather as a multi-
faceted .force in the struggle for cultural power, carried on in the mode of the
production of meaning. All "meaning," Hall said, "is always a social production,
a practice. The world has to be made to mean." (See Hall, "The Recovery of
'Ideology,'" in Michael Gurevitch and others, eds., Culture, Society and the Media,
1982.)
Also strongly influenced by Gramsci were Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe, who in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) argued for an understanding
of soc~ety grounde~, ~ot in economic determinism, but in the nature oflanguage.
AdaptI~g the ~InguIStIC view of Ferdinand de Saussure that the identity of a sign
and of Its SIgnIficance was not intrinsic, but determined by its position in a differ-
~ntial. sy~~em, they argued that such "~nfixity" was "the condition of every social
IdentIty, so that the place of power In a society can be legitimately occupied by
anyone or any group. With the aid of Sausserian language theory, Laclau and
Mouffe propose a view of society that, instead of being stricdy determined by

186 MARXIST CRITICISM
modes of production and the laws of economics, is open to innovation, transfor-
mation, and self-invention. (For Saussure's linguistic theory, see under linguistics in
, literary criticism and semiotics. For post-Marxist theory in general, refer to Geoffrey
Galt Harpham, Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity, 2002, pp. 70-141.)
In England the many social and critical writings of Raymond Williams mani-
fest an adaptation of Marxist concepts to his humanistic concern with the overall
texture of an individual's "lived experience." A leading theorist of Marxist criti-
cism in England is Terry Eagleton, who expanded and elaborated the concepts
of Althusser and Macherey into his view that a literary text is a special kind of
production in which ideological discourse--described as any system of mental re-
presentations oflived experience-is reworked into a specifically literary discourse .
In recent years Eagleton has been increasingly hospitable to the tactical use, for
dealing with ideology in literature, of concepts derived from deconstruction and
from Lacan's version of Freudian psychoanalysis. Eagleton views such poststructur-
alist analyses as useful to Marxist critics of literary texts insofar as they serve to
undermine reigning beliefs and certainties, but solely as preliminary to the prop-
erly Marxist enterprise of exposing their ideological motivation and to the appli-
cation of the criticism of literature toward politically desirable ends.
The most prominent American theorist, Fredric Jameson, is also the most
eclectic of Marxist critics. In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act (1981), Jameson expressly adapts to his critical enterprise such seem-
ingly incompatible viewpoints as the medieval theory of fourfold levels of mean-
ing in the allegorical interpretation of the Bible, the archetypal criticism of Northrop
Frye, structuralist criticism, Lacan's reinterpretations of Freud, semiotics, and deconstruc-
tion. These modes of criticism, Jameson asserts, are applicable at various stages of
the critical interpretation of a literary work; but Marxist criticism, he contends,
"subsumes" all the other "interpretive modes," by retaining their positive findings
within a "political interpretation of literary texts" which stands as the "final" or
"absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation." This last-analysis "political
interpretation" of a literary text involves an exposure of the hidden role of the
"political unconscious"-a concept which Jameson describes as his "collective,"
or "political," adaptation of the Freudian concept that each individual's uncon-
scious is a repository of repressed desires. (See psychological and psychoanalytic criticism.)
In a mode similar to Macherey, Jameson affirms that in any literary product of
our late capitalist era, the "rifts and discontinuities" in the text, and especially
those elements which, in the French phrase, are its "non-dit" (its not-said), are
symptoms of the repression by a predominant ideology of the contradictions of
"History" into the depths of the political unconscious; and the content of this re-
pressed History, Jameson asserts, is the revolutionary process of "the collective
struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity." In the final stage
of an interpretation, Jameson holds, the Marxist critic "rewrites," in the mode of
"allegory," the literary text "in such a way that the [text] may be seen as the ...
re~onstruction of a prior historical or ideological subtext"-that is, of the text's un-
spoken, because repressed and unconscious, awareness of the ways it is determined
not only by current ideology, but also by the long-term process of true "History."
(See allegory.)
MASQUE 187
Refer to sociology of literature, and for the Marxist wing of the new historicism,
see cultural materialism under the entry new historicism. Useful introductions to
Marxist criticism in general are the essays in Maynard Solomon, ed., Marxism and
Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (1979); Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne, eds.,
Marxist Uterary Theory: A Reader (1996) . In addition to the writings listed above,
refer to Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism (1950); Raymond Williams,
Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1960) and Marxism and Uterature (1977); Peter
Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets: Origins cif Marxist Uterary Criticism (1967);
Waiter Benjamin, Illuminations (trans. 1968); Louis Althusser, Lenin and
Philosophy, and Other Essays (1969, trans. 1971), and For Marx (1996); Fredric
Jameson, Marxism and Form (1971), and Late Marxism : Adorno, or the Persistence of
the Dialectic (1996); Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds., Marx and Engels on
Uterature and Art (1973); Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (1976) and Marxism
and Uterary Criticism (1976); Chris Bullock and David Peck, eds., Guide to Marxist
Uterary Criticism (1980); Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (1982); J. J.
McGann, The Romantic Ideology (1983); J. G Merquior, Western Marxism (1986).
Various essays by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak assimilate Marxist concepts both to
deconstruction and to the viewpoint of feminist criticism; see, for example, her
"Displacement and the Discourse of Women," in Displacement: Derrida and Afier,
ed. Mark Krupnick (1983). For Derrida's "reading" of Marx, see his Specters of
Marx: The State cif the Debt, the Work cif Mourning, and the New International
(1994). For a sharp critique of recent theorists of Marxist criticism, see Frederick
Crews, "Dialectical Immaterialism," in Skeptical Engagements (1986); also Richard
Levin, "The New Interdisciplinarity in Literary Criticism," in Nancy Easterlin and
Barbara Riebling, eds., Afier Poststructuralism : Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory,
1993. Marxist concerns also serve to form the new formalism in literary criticism;
see Robert Kaufinan, "Red Kant, or The Persistence of the Third Critique in
Adomo and Jameson," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26 (2000).
For references to Marxist criticism in other entries, see pages 8, 65, 78, 128,
146, 161,224,230,281,334.
masculine ending: 197.
masculine rhyme: 317 .
masque: The masque (a variant spelling of "mask") was inaugurated in Renaissance
Italy and flourished in England during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and
Charles I. In its full development, it was an elaborate form of court entertainment
that combined poetic drama, music, song, dance, splendid costuming, and stage
spectacle. A plot-often slight, and mainly mythological and allegorical-served
to hold together these diverse elements. The speaking characters, who wore masks
(hence the title), were often played by amateurs who belonged to courtly society.
The play concluded with a dance in which the players doffed their masks and
were joined by the audience.
In the early seventeenth century in England the masque drew upon the finest
artistic talents of the day, including Ben Jonson for the poetic script (for example,
The Masque of Blacknesse and The Masque of Queens) and Inigo Jones, the architect,