Literature and Society Flashcards
What does the Marxist Terry Eagleton claim?
In theory “there is always more at stake than views of literature; all theories are readings of social reality”
What does the Marxist Ralph Fox calim?
Novelists “make us fo the past to change, not only the past itself, but also the present. Culture is something we must use in order to lve, and not merely an object of aesthetic consciousness”
Louis Althusser - what does society strive to do and how?
Society strives to reproduce itself always, as “the ultiamte condition of production is the reproduction fo the conditions of production” - useful to consider continuities in society/literature and its purpose
ISAs and RSAs work to ensure the continued dominance of the ideology of the ruling class
Louis Althusser - what is ideology, and what is it comparable to?
Ideology is ‘eternal, exactly like the unconscious’
Ideology is a ‘representation’ of the imagined relationship of individuals to their real (material) conditions of existence. However, it is represented TO, not BY, each individual who experiences - thus they are created as subjects themselves BY ideology. a process which althusser calls “interpelllation”
Therefore, “individuals are always already subjects”
Lakoff and Johnson
Suggest we “live by” metaphors - conceptual metaphoes
According to the structrualist studies of Levi-Strauss, what is muth?
Myth is language with a rthird referent (beyond lagnue and parole) - it is ‘everlasting’, describing past/present/future simultaneously
Also like language, myth does NOT have its meaning in parts, but by their combination
Oscar Wilde
‘all art is quite useless’
What does Fredric Jameson (Marxist with Postmodern influences) claim?
That the ‘production of aesthetic form is…an ideological act’ [consider context of his writing - modernity and advertisements, link to marxism/capital etc]
The production of aesthetic forms is an attempt to invent ‘imaginary or formal “solutions” to unresolvable contradictions” found in society - thus “literature is a soically symbolic act”
What does the Formalist Victor Shklovsky suggest are the ‘two aspects of imagery’?
as a ‘practical means of thinking’ and a ‘poetic means of reinforcing an impression’. Different ‘laws’ apply to these two distinct modes of language
Art uses ‘defamiliarisation’ - its purpose is to express things ‘as they are perceived and not as they are knwon’, thus ‘an image is not a permanent referent….its purpose is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special percpetion of the object’
