Marxism

 

 Hello Friends!

I am Nidhi Jethava and I am a student of Mk Bhavnagar university department of English.  It is a very interesting task that after completing particular units we have to do thinking activity. In this blog I am going to discuss Marxism. 

So, Let’s briefly discuss Marxism.

Where did the term come from ? 

Answer :- 

Marxism is derived from the great philosopher Karl Marx. 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-thinker Friedrich Engels (1820–95), and especially on the following claims: 

1. In the Marxist literary analysis, the evolving history of humankind, of its social groupings and interrelations, of its institutions, and of its ways of thinking are largely determined by the changing mode of its “material production”— that is, of its overall economic organization for producing and distributing material goods. 

2. Changes in the fundamental mode of material production effect changes in the class structure of a society, establishing in each era dominant and subordinate classes that engage in a struggle for economic, political, and social advantage. 

3. Human consciousness is constituted by an ideology—that is, the beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings perceive, and by recourse to which they explain, what they take to be reality. An ideology is, in complex ways, the product of the position and interests of a particular class. In any historical era, the dominant ideology embodies, and serves to legitimize and perpetuate, the interests of the dominant economic and social class. 

 

 

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 (see Chapter 9, pp. 182-9). 

5. A fifth Marxist practice is the 'politicisation of literary form', that is, the claim that literary forms are themselves determined by political circumstance. For instance, in the view of some critics, literary realism carries with it an implicit validation of conservative social structures: for others, the formal and metrical intricacies of the sonnet and the iambic pentameter are a counterpart of social stability, decorum, and order. 

 

Examples :-  

1. Movie #Parasite

 

 

#Oscar_winning_Movie

#2019

#Marxist theory

 

The idea of maximalist theory is to bring equality among human beings.  This film #Parasite also consists of the same theory. The movie describes the two families. One is from a very high class family and another is from a poor background. 

Kin Family 

Park Family 

This is the story of a rich and poor family. The Kin family is very poor and always search for food but they are very smart but due to laziness they are always in search of food. The Park family is a very aristocratic family.

"Parasite" is a marvelously entertaining film in terms of narrative, but there’s also so much going on underneath about how the rich use the poor to survive in ways that I can’t completely spoil here (the best writing about this movie will likely come after it’s released). Suffice to say, the wealthy in any country survive on the labor of the poor, whether it’s the housekeepers, tutors, and drivers they employ, or something much darker. Kim's family will be reminded of that chasm and the cruelty of inequity in ways you couldn’t possibly predict.

 

2. Money Heist 

 

 

Money Heist (Spanish: La casa de papel, "The House of Paper") is a Spanish heist crime drama television series created by Álex Pina. The series traces two long-prepared heists led by the Professor (Álvaro Morte), one on the Royal Mint of Spain, and one on the Bank of Spain, told from the perspective of one of the robbers, Tokyo (Úrsula Corberó). The narrative is told in a real-time-like fashion and relies on flashbacks, time-jumps, hidden character motivations, and an unreliable narrator for complexity. 

 

#Marxist reading 

 #Red color

Money Heist, a very popular web series. It has five sessions. The motives of the story are also very Marxist. They do heist not because of personal use but because of social equality. 

The dressing code is also significant to read this entire web series from the Marxist perception. It has red color which is very fundamental idea of Marxism. 

 

Thank You.  

 

Feminist Reading

 

 Hello everyone! 

Feminism, Ecocriticism, Marxism and queer studies are the parts of our syllabus. It’s very interesting to apply all the theories in literature and try to connect with suitable literary text. In this blog I am going to discuss feminism.

Key concepts :-

Definition of feminism 

Some of the major ideas 

Major writers 

Example

So, let’s discuss what feminism is. 

 

 

As a distinctive and concerted approach to literature, feminist criticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1960s. Behind it, however, lie two centuries of struggle for the recognition of women’s cultural roles and achievements, and for women’s social and political rights, marked by such books as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and the American Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). 

Feminism is a movement to free women from oppressive restraints. Which are these restraints ? 

Let’s discuss that one by one 

• What is the definition of women ?

• Definition of cultural identity/identification of women ?

• Does a woman enjoy equal rights to men ?

• Is patriarchal order dominance responsibles for the weak form of feminism ?

• Does any language emerge for women ?

It was Woolf who asked ‘Why is it difficult or impossible for women to write ?

Some of the basic claims :-

1. The basic view is that Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal (ruled by the father)—that is, it is male-centered and -controlled, and is organized and conducted in such a way as to subordinate women to men in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal, and artistic.

2. It is widely held that while one’s sex as a man or woman is determined by anatomy, the prevailing concepts of gender—of the traits that are conceived to constitute what is masculine and what is feminine in temperament and behavior—are largely, if not entirely, social constructs that were generated by the pervasive patriarchal biases of our civilization.

3. The further claim is that this patriarchal (or “masculinist,” or “androcentric”) ideology pervades those writings which have been traditionally considered great literature, and which until recently have been written mainly by men for men

Major works :-

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

 John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869)

 American Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929)

Mary Ellmann’s Thinking about Women (1968)

Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics

Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader

Patricia Meyer Spacks’ The Female Imagination (1975)

 Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979; rev. 2000)

What feminist critics do ?

1. Rethink the canon, aiming at the rediscovery of texts written by women. 

2. Revalue women's experience. 

3. Examine representations of women in literature by men and women. 

4. Challenge representations of women as 'Other', as 'lack', as part of 'nature'. 

5. Examine power relations which are obtained in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the extent of patriarchy. 

6. Recognise the role of language in making what is social and constructed seem transparent and 'natural'. 

7. Raise the question of whether men and women are 'essentially' different because of biology, or are socially constructed as different. 

8. Explore the question of whether there is a female language, an ecriture feminine, and whether this is also available to men. 

9. 'Re-read' psychoanalysis to further explore the issue of female and male identity. 

10. Question the popular notion of the death of the author, asking whether there are only 'subject positions ... constructed in discourse', or whether, on the contrary, the experience (e.g. of a black or lesbian writer) is central. 

11. Make clear the ideological base of supposedly 'neutral' or 'mainstream' literary interpretations. 

Examples 

1. Movie ‘ Thappad’ 

A very interesting movie. The protagonist is Amrita, by profession she was also a housewife by choice. Her husband totally depends on her. Amrita worked like anything for her, She might have thought that her husband respected and cared for her. After months she was slapped by Vikram in front of so many guest and relatives. This one slap broke Amrita. She realizes her own identity.  She said, `` Ek Thappad bas itni si baat ? no, women are not about to bear such things.  Amrita decided to give divorce to her husband. She started a new life. Women are not suppressed by men. 

It's a very fascinating movie. Generally people might think that women are only for pleasure. If she goes against you, you can beat her, because her slave. So this movie is the best example of that kind of mentality. 

 

 

Before Thappad 

 After Thappad

                                                                                         

So, this one Thappad changed the whole image of Amrita’s life. That thappad was not on her cheeks but that slap was on her existence, her identity, her own thoughts. 

 

Thank you..... 

Eco-criticism - 'Tree once again' by Shitanshu Yashshchndra

 

Hello Friends!

I am Nidhi Jethava and a student of MK Bhavnagar University. In this blog I am going to discuss eco-criticism. 

What is Eco-criticism ?

Eco-criticism was a term coined in the late 1970s by combining “criticism” with a shortened form of “ecology”—the science that investigates the interrelations of all forms of plant and animal life with each other and with their physical habitats. 

Eco-criticism is the study of the relationship between literature and nature.

What do eco-critics do ? 

 

 

1. They re-read major literary works from an ecocentric perspective, with particular attention to the representation of the natural world. 

2. They extend the applicability of a range of ecocentric concepts, using them of things other than the natural world -concepts such as growth and energy, balance and imbalance, symbiosis and mutuality, and sustainable or unsustainable uses of energy and resources. 

3. They give special canonical emphasis to writers who foreground nature as a major part of their subject matter, such as the American transcendentalists, the British Romantics, the poetry of John Clare, the work of Thomas Hardy and the Georgian poets of the early twentieth century. 

4. They extend the range of literary-critical practice by placing a new emphasis on relevant 'factual' writing, especially reflective topographical material such as essays, travel writing, memoirs, and regional literature. 

5. They turn away from the 'social constructivism' and 'linguistic determinism' of dominant literary theories (with their emphasis on the linguistic and social constructedness of the external world) and instead emphasise ecocentric values of meticulous observation, collective ethical responsibility, and the claims of the world beyond ourselves. 

Example :- 

Here I would like to give an example of the poem ‘ Tree Once Again’ By Sitanshu Yashschandra. It is originally written in Gujarati but it is translate by Devang Nanavati. 

 Tree once Again by Sitanshu Yashschandra :-

 

That olden ocher brown tree trunk

Already sawed, rasped and tip-tapped for so many 

Years from now

Was used to make the furniture for home.

The dining table for hasty meals and the chairs,

And the table to write letters to the new

 acquaintances and to thee seniors 

A radio stand from which absolute fresh news keep 

Flowing daily-so many things of such great importance

Were made out of 

That olden ocher brown tree trunk.

Nowhere a storm struck. Nor did any thunder bolts.

Even not a tint of memory could trace how that tree 

looked like. Tree ?

Funny it sounds and I cannot believe it today 

That this table, chairs, writing table, stand, book shelf

All the things

Were indeed an olden tree once upon a time!

Today, It’s incredible 

And, perhaps I would laugh.

That

A red bird suddenly takes a flight from the self 

Where the flies of Jankalyan and Akhand anand are 

Stocked.

That

The intoxicating fragrance of a spring arriving

Unannounced oozen into the drawer where the daily 

Wares are kept folded.

And, then, again one laughs a little, and feels

amused, and remember 

That 

The olden orchard brown tree trunk 

Already saved, rasped and tip-tapped so many years

From now 

Has been used to make the furniture for home.

                                      Translated by Nanavati D.S.

 

Explanation :-

The poem is very eco- centric and it talks about how we mercilessly use trees. Poets remember that trees from which all these stuff like chairs, tables, stands are made. Human beings cut down the trees and it will be very harmful for the environment. Sitanshu sir very wisely describes the problem of Eco-criticism in this poem.  In this poem the environment is at the center. How do we read the trees ? We used so many things made by trees and so many forests are also becoming desert humans for their sake and need and greed constantly harms the environment. This poem very silently puts a light on that matters. 

 

This poem deals with idea of the world whether it should be ego centrist or Eco-centric ?  

 

 

 Thank you....