A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature Chapter 4: Materialisms

Chapter 4 I. Marxism Economic theory of Karl Marx; Marxist terms; Marxist literary theory “Old” or “vulgar” Marxism versus American liberals “Slice of life” (Trotsky) versus “forces” and “reification” (Lukács); hegemony (Gramsci); “cultural capital” (Bourdieu); “political unconscious” (Jameson); working-class sensibility (Williams) II. British Cultural Materialism Roots in Arnold, Tylor, Lévi-Strauss, Leavis; not all culture is high culture—“culture is ordinary” (Hall)

Chapter 4 III. New Historicism Differences with “old” historicism Literature and history influence each other History as complex and unstable textually as literature Influence of Foucault, Lyotard, Jameson; Greenblatt Geertz’s “thick description” Exchange, negotiation, circulation of ideas in cultural “marketplace” Example of Gulliver’s Travels

Chapter 4 IV. Ecocriticism Relationship between literature and the natural environment Joseph Carroll: “green cultural studies” in a threatened natural world—at forefront of criticism due to urgent environmental problems Divided between study of nature writers and ecological themes in literature Native American perspective Ecofeminism

Chapter 4 VI. Literary Darwinism Darwin’s theory of evolution based on natural selection Opposed to prevailing poststructuralist and postmodernist theory, especially the argument that discourse constructs reality—instead, evolution precedes and to some extent determines discourse humans share a common nature—cf mythological approaches; theories that deny the biological basis of behavior are unsound; evolutionary purposes of literature; evolutionary fitness

VI. Literary Darwinism (cont’d) E. O. Wilson as founder (“consilience”); Barah and Barash, Madame Bovary’s Ovaries (Why does literature exist? It tells us about human nature and helps us survive—reading of Othello); McEwan on Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (literature encodes our “cultural and genetic inheritance”); Carroll—role of art is to make sense of human needs and motives, the need “to create cognitive order” Chapter 4