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Pa(瓦尔特·本雅明)
A text is like any other commodity produced by capitalism. There exists no purely aesthetic activity that seeks to relate to human consciousness. A text reveals a culture’s fragmentation but not its wholeness. Having stripped literature of what he calls its “quasireligious aura”, the enlightened reader will be able to resist the bourgeois ideology embedded within the text and will not mindlessly acquiesce to the empty images, thinking, and desires depicted in some works.
Marxist Criticism
Western Critical Theory Project
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The Frankfurt School (法兰克福学派)
Closely allied to Lukács and reflection theory, another group of theorists emerged in Germany known as the Frankfurt school, a neo-Marxist group devoted to developing Western Marxist principles. Included in this group are Theodor Adorno西奥多·阿多诺, Walter Benjamin瓦尔特·本 雅明, and Max Horkheimer马克思·霍克海默.
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新左派对于战后资本主义的认识不乏深刻和独到之处，可 是在改造现行社会体制的策略上。往往有书生论证的流弊： 空有道德的热情 言辞的激烈和理论的深刻，全无实际上 的可行性 纵观新左派的历史，他们对当代资本主义社会的分析不可 谓不透彻，抨击不可谓不激烈，却没有带来根本性改观。 新作品一位历史学家说“虽说我们实际上没有改变世界， 但至少我们理解了这个世界”
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文化唯物主义（莎翁作品）
《亨利五世》 《仲夏夜之梦》
《奥赛罗》
《暴风雨》 《威尼斯人》
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Terry Eagleton (特里·伊格尔顿)
He argues that criticism must break with its ideological prehistory and become a science. the central problem is to define the relationship between literature and ideology. Criticism is concerned not with just the laws of literary form or the theory of ideology but with rather with the laws of the production of ideological discourses as literature. The critic must dismantle received notions of ‘literature’ and reveal their ideological role in shaping the subjectivity of readers.
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Fredric Jameson (费雷德里克·詹姆逊)
Dialectical criticism: he believes that in the post-industrial world of monopoly capitalism the only kind of Marxism which has any purchase on the situation is a Marxism which explores the great themes of Hegel’s philosophy--the relationship of part to whole, the opposition between concrete and abstract, the concept of totality, the dialectic of appearance and essence, the interaction between subject and object.
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‘New left’ Marxism
These Marxists viewed Marxism as an alternative to the decadence and emptiness of bourgeois thought. It contained a compelling analysis of the historical moment, a vision of the future, and a philosophy -dialectical materialism -- that unified nature and history, thought and reality, theory and practice.
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Raymond Williams (雷蒙·威廉斯)
Cultural materialism: Study of material culture and literary production characteristics within the historical materialism . He presents a systematic delineation of Marxist cultural perspectives.