Handout

Marxism Handout

1. Marxist criticisms put texts into historical contexts, and try to change that context – to have _______________________________(333).

2. Economics provides the base or infrastructure of society, but from that base emerges a superstructure consisting of ____________________________________(320).

3. It is, rather, __________________________(320).

4. Russia and Lenin: Marxism is a way in which new artistic forms would be _________________________ with revolutionary political views and agendas (321).

5. Trotsky: Warned of the danger of cultural sterility and risked unpopularity by pointing out that there is no necessary connection between the quality of a literary work and the ___________________________ (322).

6. Also influenced modern cultural criticism by showing, in a sense, that the conflict between ___________________________ takes place not only between classic and popular texts, but also between the dialogic voices that exist within many books, whether high or low (323).

7. Lukacs: Prefers _______ over form (323).

8. Non-Soviet Marxists: Kept Marxist critical theory alive and useful in discussing all kinds of literature written __________________________________ (323).

9. Brecht: Art ought to be viewed as a ___________________, not as a container of content (323).

10. Structuralism: a scientific approach to the study of humankind whose proponents believed that all elements of culture, including literature, could be understood as _____________________ (324).

11. Goldmann: Economics determines the mental structures of social groups, which are reflected in literary texts. He rejected the idea of ______________________, choosing to see works instead as the collective products of trans-individual mental structures (324).

12. Althusser: Viewed literary works primarily in terms of the relationship to ideology, the function of which, he argued, used to ___________________of production in a given society (325).

13. Williams: Culture is lived experience, and as such, an ____________________________, each and all grounded in and influencing history (326).

14. To place TOTS in historical context, Robbins looks at the story in relation to the history of _______________________________________ (328).

15. James attempted to resist the kind of historical interpretation that would bring to bear a knowledge of social groups and ideologies. The ghosts, he suggests, are ___________________________ to effect that resistance. How can a critic talk about ideology, Robbins asks, when the major characters are not social beings, but supernatural ones? (328)

16. Robbins goes on to show that what individuals were willing to say to one another, what they saw when they looked at one another, what they knew about themselves, and what they were willing to admit they knew about themselves were all ___________________________________ (329).

17. Without interference from the upper classes, Robbins contents, the children have become little democrats, unable to see the sin in ____________________________________ that the adult world takes for granted (329).

18. He ends his essay by bringing it full circle, by helping us see “the attempt to change the historical context in which we read, to have __________________________” (333): “the tendency both to show that the text reinforces the prevailing ideology and… to reveal those gaps that of those tragic contradictions implicit in such an ideology” (329).

19 The hierarchical microcosm that James displays in TOTS is therefore full of ____________________________. And it is in these spaces of necessary obscurity that the ghosts emerge and operate. To the extent that the story is about the ghosts, it is not merely about ambiguity. It is also about the social production of ambiguity (337).

20. The adjective “low” makes the connection between their physical positions, higher and lower on the staircase, and their ____________________________(339).

21. In Victorian England, to assert that _______________________ might well have been enough to earn expulsion from a respectable school (342).

22. Miles has refused to play along with the __________________________that consigns the servants to willed, organized invisibility/that makes them all ghostly (342).

23. Whether we imagine that the governess has frightened Miles to death or embraced him to the point of suffocation, the scaring and the caring leave us with the bitter image of ______________________________. Ironically, not by the absolute might of the governing class, but by the relative weakness of its indoctrinated underlings, the “governessing” class (343).

24. These connections between governess and ghosts have been assembled as evidence, mainly by the antighost party, in order to ________________________________________(345).

25. The critic is trying to learn from the governess’s pupils how to change social reality, trying to edge history in the direction that James’s children have pointed out to us. The point of this piece of criticism is to help ensure that children in the future will ______________________________(346).