Marxism and literary criticism

Abstract

It was never suggested that there be a theory of literature by Marx, Engels, Lafargue, Lenin, or Trotsky. Their literary analyses take the form of sporadic publications, lacking in-depth analysis of the specifics of literature or its role as an ideology. For a very long period, a Marxist literary critique that was mostly free of political concerns did not exist because there was no corpus of literary objects among the classic writings of communism.

However, Marxist approaches to literature emerged after the Liberation and, in opposition to the predominately idealist traditions, took an interest in the social factors influencing literary output from a materialist perspective. The international crisis sparked by the XXth Congress of the CPSU, which started de-Stalinization, allowed the French Communist Party to relax its initial control over Marxist corpora and later its control over their dissemination beginning in the middle of the 1950s. Marxism is being discussed more and more in the intellectual and cultural spheres at the same time.

The subject of forms is then reinvested in literary criticism, which frequently comes from anti-Stalinist leftists, in opposition to the notion that creative creations are only "reflective" of their material conditions of production. For some of them, it also pertains to the practice of ideological criticism, which involves making the mechanisms of power communicated by the discourses evident. The appropriations of Marxism are broadening in light of the changes in French literary criticism and gradually including many intellectual activities and political stances. From the 1970s onward, the explicit claim of Marxism decreased as some academics who extended the building of Marxist approaches acquired a place in academia