Reassessing Surrealism: Constructivism and Postcapitalist Appropriation

Marxist literary criticism flourishes from Karl Marx and Engel’s theories on revolutionary change. Through the implicit and explicit detail of a novel, Marxist criticism unravels a text’s underlying economic purpose. A Marxist will read a text and expose “social contexts in ways which the author themselves would not admit” (158). A professor from the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) teaches authors inevitably impose their social class ideology on their work, consequently inserting an ideology within the lines of the novel reflecting the struggles of

“Foucault’s work gave the terms discursive practices and discursive formation to the analysis of particular institutions and their ways of establishing orders of truth, or what is accepted as ‘reality’ in a given society” (Goldberg). Discursive formations display hierarchical arrangement and are understood as reinforcing certain already established identities or subjectivities- in matters of sexuality, status, or class for example. These dominant discourses are understood as in turn reinforced by existing systems of law, education and the media”. Foucault’s work is to show that members of society such as intellectuals, “are implicated in discourse and in the discursive regimes or systems of power and regulation which give them their livelihoods

This paper attempts to offer a Marxist reading of Conrad 's Heart of Darkness (1899) and Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) . Specifically , this paper highlights how the concept of commodification helps us to understand the dialectic struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat which are both considered the products of their socioeconomic and material circumstance with an emergent capitalist culture. By depicting how capitalists in the two novellas commodify objects or humans and by investigating the struggles between the 'haves' and the 'haves-not' .

Philosopher Arthur Danto, author of “The Artworld,” an artistic criticism, states that “to see something as art requires something that the eye cannot descry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld” (201). Artistic theory, according to Danto, requires the presence of a subject, style, rhetorical ellipses, and that of historical context. Danto is capable of developing this view on art with the aid of an imaginary character, Testadura. Testadura, however, makes mistakes, as well as corrections, about the objects before him.

The use of counter culture and ideology can provide unique perspectives on the issues faced by everyone, even those who do not acknowledge it. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh portrays a drug addict who rejects any conventions of normalcy in the pursuit of an alternate reality. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis does the same through the depiction of a rich and greedy Wall Street tycoon. This essay will closely analyze the themes of illusion and reality in Trainspotting and American Psycho. The relationship between the fantasy world and the “real” world in these texts are closely linked and aid the narrative in a criticism of social and structural issues. The texts are often criticized as glorifying drug use and violence however through analyzing the effect of narrative, drug use and culture on the characters reality and illusions will argue that the elements of drug use and violence help in the deconstruction of greed and popular culture in the texts.

Death of a Salesman and Metamorphosis are prime examples of two pieces of literature that can be used as a voice for the oppressed. This is evident in how Miller and Kafka both express their observations of their own population’s oppression, either literally or conceptually. This is shown through their political philosophy visible in their writing, their experiences with extreme levels of capitalism, and their reluctance to follow an institution. These two works show how an author’s personal context can be directly correlated to the struggles in which the characters face as well.

Thus, the primary theme of the works of Tarantino is a mythopoetical reality. 2. Libertarianism and pretextual nationalism “Class is part of the genre of narrativity,” says Debord; however, according to Dahmus[2] , it is not so much class that is part of the genre of narrativity, but rather the genre, and subsequent failure, of class. Baudrillard uses the term ‘pretextual nationalism’ to denote the role of the participant as reader. In a sense, the characteristic theme of Wilson’s[3] critique of libertarianism is the futility, and eventually the dialectic, of neotextual society.

The 1976 film Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scosese does a good job of telling the tale of a working class laborer. Since the working-class protagonist in Taxi Driver seems to fail in directing violence toward political ends, one might argue that the film Taxi Driver rejects the proletarian class as the revolutionary class. However, the film embraces several ideas from Marxist thought, specifically Marx's idea of separate classes; proletariat and bourgeoisie in society. For instance, the use of social structures and the idea of the lower class revolting. Taking this into account is important because it helps us to better understand how the film views the economic system that produces people like Travis. This paper argues that the film

In Unforgiven, the status quo of the Western genre is scrutinized for its schismatic approach that morally polarized characters and provided a mythical history of the beginning of industrialization and urbanization.The deconstruction of Old Hollywood’s mythical history has metaphorical significance as it also deconstructs a priori concepts of romanticized violence and characterizations of cultural stereotypes indoctrinated in Old Hollywood. However, the concept of deconstructing myths is a part of the revisionist Western genre history and has been done previously. Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven can be seen as revising his own Western canon. The approach this paper takes is in a tripartite: An Ode to a Western Urn (a look at how the past affects

Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is originally published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg's Marxist and the Interpretation of culture (1988).

The film Pulp Fiction was an immediate box office success when it was released in 1994 and it was also well received by the critics, and celebrated for the way it appeared to capture exactly a certain pre-millennial angst and dislocation in Western capitalist societies. The term post-modernist, often used to refer to art and architecture, was applied to this film. The pulp fiction refers to popular novels which are bought in large numbers by less well educated people and enjoyed for their entertainment value. The implication is that the film concerns topics of interest to this low culture, but as this essay will show, in fact, the title is ironic and the film is a very intellectual presentation of issues at the heart of contemporary

Power relations present themselves in many ways. Some ideas of power are naturalised within our media, and become parts of our everyday lives. These discourses, or the way these messages are constructed (Burr, 46), are analysed to see what the message is, and how it is conveyed. In this essay, I shall examine the power relations between men and women using Shoshanna and Frederick’s café scene from the film Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009). Within their gendered power relations, I shall also look at the relation between being the occupier and the occupied, as well as the ‘nice guy’ myth that is perpetuated by Frederick throughout the scene, taking some context from the wider film.

Naomi Greene once said that, “Pier Paolo Pasolini was the more protean figure than anyone else in the world of film.” This means that Pasolini was a versatile film director because he simplified cinema into the simplest way possible, while still visually embodying an important message to his cinematic viewers. Because of his encounter with Italy’s social changes, it influenced the writing and films he chose to write. His aspirations regarding his written work “Cinema of Poetry” explains how a writer usage of words and a filmmaker’s choice of images are linked to how cinema can be a poetry of language. He characterizes cinema as irrational and his approach on free indirect point of view is used to achieve a particular effect in his body of work. His claims made in the Cinema of Poetry illustrate why he stylized his films in the manner he did, such as Mamma Roma through the images he portrayed on screen. By examining Pasolini’s approach to poetic communication in the Cinema of Poetry, we can see that these cinematic attributes about reality and authenticity depicted in Mamma Roma are utilized to question cinematic viewer’s effortless identification of cinema with life. This is important to illustrate because Pasolini wants to motivate viewers to have an interpretative rather than a passionate relationship with the screen.

            While Marxist critics must admit that they themselves are helpless to avoid the effects of hegemony, the critical project of Marxist literary criticism remains steadfastly committed to the attempt to identify and understand the mediating contexts in which the forces of hegemony exert pressure on a text, its author, and its audience. These contexts manifest themselves within specific historical, economic, political, cultural, etc... conditions. In order to discover such contexts, a work of art cannot be uprooted from the specific temporal circumstances in which it is read or created and regarded as an isolated purely original entity. Literature, for better or worse, is mired in history.

The late capitalist novel has become an area of interest to authors, critics and readers alike. Novels such as Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and the novels of J.G. Ballard, all gained notoriety as novels that commented on the effects of globalization, hyper-consumerism and hyper-individualism. However, these novels tend to focus on the upper and middle classes and do not comment on the effects that globalization and deindustrialization had on the working class. The much understudied Last Exit to Brooklyn (LETB) by Hubert Selby Jr. (1964) and Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh (1993), however do just that. The novels – although set almost 30 years and an ocean apart – share many commonalities, and with Welsh’s introduction to the LETB 2011 edition, it is surprising that no one has studied the two novels together. Perhaps this is because LETB has often been studied within the context of religion, violent sexuality and naturalism. While these are all valid contexts of studying the novel I would like to take a different approach by analyzing it together with Trainspotting. The novels have many similar themes, ideas and styles and it seems important to read them side by side because they both convey the conditions and effects of late capitalism and neoliberalism on the working class, and show what happens ‘when the working class stops working’