/lit/ - Literature

I mean, just anything would be good really... anything that caught your eye in a journal or something...

>>5124772
>marxists
>not in most academic departments

>>5124850

Does he tackle any novels particularly well?

>>5124860

Uh... yes? That's not my point of contention.

>>5124890
Slavoj takes on movies sometimes

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/hollywood-today-report-from-an-ideological-frontline/

He touches on The Dark Knight in this one

>>5124772
original picture.

>This is not a troll thread.

Nothing worth reading ever starts out this way.

>>5124772
>So I've been assigned to make a Marxist critique of any novel I want, but, although I think I'm on board with the concept of a base and it's subsequent superstructure, I'm a little unsure how to a) establish the socioeconomic base of a writer and b) how to see where this influences the texts.

Individuals aren't significant in the political complexion of the work, their class background is irrelevant. It is the class structure of authorship and reception in a particular society that matters.

You won't deal with "base" in analysing a text, literature is superstructural, unless you follow Stalin on Linguistics.

Seriously, author intentionality? Go read some fucking Lukacs until you get it.

>Does /lit/ have any good examples of scholarly Marxist critiques?

Lukacs.

Also, are there any books you guys think would be particularly suitable for this sort of analysis?

Lukacs, Adorno, Debord.

I was thinking of trying Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, for what it's worth.

>>5125175


OK, I'll check him out. I assume you mean György Lukács? Which of his works should you start with?

>>5125389
Fucked if I know, I do real fucken marxism: history.

>>5124772
I was looking for books on the napoleonic wars in Russia and I found this old book in my library written by some soviet academic and then translated into english. Napoleon's invasion of Russia, 1812.
Тарле, Е. В. (Евгений Викторович),
here is a link:

http://www.questia.com/library/715170/napoleon-s-invasion-of-russia-1812
I think it is written in the style that you are trying to mimic.

>>5124772
Anything by Solzhenitsyn, or I Married a Communist. Animal Farm is a good one too.

>>5124772
>Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
Real fuckin' original.

>>5124772
>This is not a troll thread

confirmed for troll thread

>>5126362

Have you seen someone else analyse it? If so, please send me a link.

>>5126311

This looks like history more than literature... thanks though.

>>5126358

I'm not looking for books about communism.

That assignment sounds worthless, I can't believe a teacher actually gave it.

Terry Eagleton's sort of *the* prominent contemporary Marxist working on aesthetic and cultural questions. Just google him. He writes for the Guardian and other major publications pretty regularly, and has a ton of books out. I would recommend The Ideology of the Aesthetic.

Other than that there's, uh, all of Critical Theory. Adorno, Horkheimer, Walter, and on, and on... Walter has some very interesting essays on Proust, but they're not exactly "Marxist" in the sense your teacher seems to be interpreting that descriptor.

>>5126967

I must be high...Walter Benjamin is the name.

>http://traumawien.at/stuff/texts/Benjamin,-Walter-%E2%80%93-Illuminations.pdf

>>5126967
> Forgetting Gramsci and the most important idea in Marxist aesthetics, Cultural Hegemony

>>5126974

>blegh