I'm horrible at blogging.
Especially about things I know little to nothing about.
So this might just be me regurgitating facts from a textbook until I get comfortable with this class.
So bear with me.
Compared to liberal humanism, Marxism is probably the more realistic way to review and critique texts. Liberal humanism is a nice idea for assessing literary works.
According to Barry's 10 tenents of human liberalism, a text has many different meanings in itself. Which is weird to me because I base a lot of what I read from a text off of the prior knowledge I posess about it, such as the time it was written during or a bit about the author and what the author tries to portray according to him/her. It seems absurd to me that the author can't give a text a meaning and that the text itself holds the only true meaning.
According to a tenent of liberal humanism's, human nature is unchanging and the way humans are now is the way they have always been. I find this to be absolutely ridiculous, and no way to look at a text when critiquing it. Human nature changes with the centuries and also along with the economic changes that occur. Marxism points out the importance of evaluating economics in terms of evaluation of a literary work because people value posessions and material items in our capitalistic society. People are structured by their economic stance as well as their upbringings due to certain econoic advantages or disadvantages. Marxism contradicts liberal humanism in a sense that it is centered around class and economic structure, mainly being capitalism. This being said, it is easy to see such a big difference in opinion when it comes to the "right way" of interpreting a text because of how different the points are that you are viewing them from.
That was the main point that stood out to me, and hopefully I didn't confuse anybody too much. Or if I did, just kick me in the shin next time you see me for putting you through that torture.
Until my next set of incoherent literary ramblings...
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2 comments:
I agree that Marxism does seem like the more realist perspective. We hardly ever start reading a text with absolutely no background knowledge of the author or the time when they lived. I do think however that we do assume certain things about human nature when reading a text. I think if we read a text where someone went completely against their "nature" we would find it unrealistic.
I agree with your statement that the unchanging idea of literature is no way to look at a text, considering the context in which authors are writing are going to vary in many ways - what the author has been through when writing this book, what was going on when the book was written, etc. I personally feel as though the Marxist criticism has it all backwards with the "unchanging" perspective.
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