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Introduction to Lukacs

“The aesthetic debates within German Marxism are now acknowledged to constitute one of the most remarkable sequences in European cultural history this century. Few episodes either in the general history of Marxist theory or in the course of aesthetic discussion as a whole can match the depth and . . .” read more

On Walter Benjamin

“Our purpose here is to demonstrate that the spirit of allegory manifests itself quite unambiguously both in the theory and in the practice of the modernist avant-garde.” read more

Liberality and Order: The Criticism of John Bayley

“Few English literary critics command more respect than John Bayley, Warton Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford. The author of six full-length critical studies, as well as of numerous articles and reviews, Bayley has not only become established as a revered figure within the literary . . .” read more

On Bertolt Brecht

“In the realm of aesthetics, the way a thing is expressed is of a qualitatively different order from what it would be in science. No one will deny that even in science a statement can be made in a clear or confused, an elegant or a laboured manner, . . .” read more

Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia

“Intellectual currents can generate a sufficient head of water for the critic to instal his power station on them. The necessary gradient, in the case of Surrealism, is produced by the difference in intellectual level between France and Germany. What sprang up in 1919 in France in a . . .” read more

Marxism in Literary Criticism

“Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology is a work of major importance. Its range includes the conventionally separate fields of poetics (the specificity of literary discourse and the character and conditions of literary value); ‘literary criticism’ (the analysis and judgment of particular works); literary history; and the sociology of . . .” read more

'Aesthetics and Politics'

“The historic debates of the 1930s between Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno have now been assembled into a single volume, with an Afterword by Fredric Jameson. Readers of nlr have already had a foretaste of its contents: Brecht’s sardonic deflation of . . .” read more

Raymond Williams and Marxism: A Rejoinder to Terry Eagleton

“Revolutionaries have traditionally believed that there are three forms of class struggle. The first two are both relatively obvious: political mobilization and economic organization. But in addition to the political and economic struggles there is a third. Lenin, invoking the authority of Engels, called it ‘theoretical struggle’. But . . .” read more

Criticism and Politics: The Work of Raymond Williams

“It is difficult to see criticism as anything but an innocent discipline. Its origins seem spontaneous, its existence natural: there is literature, and so—because we wish to understand and appreciate it—there is also criticism. Criticism as a handmaiden to literature—as a shadowing of literature, a ghostly accomplice which, . . .” read more

Image of the People

“Each of Timothy Clark’s two books merits a separate study. Both are important works, especially fascinating for a French reader. But I shall confine myself here to Image of the People, since its field is narrower than that of The Absolute Bourgeois, and for that very reason it . . .” read more

Dialectical Materialism and Literary History

“All sociologies of thought agree that social life influences literary creation. This is also a fundamental assumption of dialectical materialism; which in addition, however, gives particular emphasis to the importance of economic factors and the relations between social classes. Many writers and philosophers dispute such an influence: they . . .” read more

Introduction to Goldmann

“By the time of his death, in the autumn of 1970, Lucien Goldmann’s standing as a Marxist theorist had noticeably begun to diminish. The reasons for this were both theoretical and political. European Marxist thought in the 1960s was characterized by the rapid, ebullient development of theoretical currents . . .” read more

Reply to Mulhern

“I am grateful for Francis Mulhern’s penetrative comment on my essay, which raises some methodological problems of first importance to Marxist criticism. He is right, I believe, that the necessarily elliptical character of my article excluded certain central issues (notably, ideological determinations other than those of ‘class situation’, . . .” read more

Comment on 'Ideology and Literary Form'

“Terry Eagleton’s essay presents two closely related lines of argument, which can be summarized, very roughly, as follows. His main thesis is historical: he outlines what he takes to be the major ideological weakness of Victorian capitalism, and describes the various attempts that were made to recast the . . .” read more

Ideology and Literary Form

“Bourgeois ideology in nineteenth-century England confronted a severe problem. Its withered roots in the sparse soil of utilitarianism seriously limited its ability to produce a richly symbolic, potently affective set of mythologies capable of permeating the texture of lived experience and so of performing the functions of an . . .” read more

Commitment

“Since Sartre’s essay What is Literature? there has been less theoretical debate about committed and autonomous literature. Nevertheless, the controversy over commitment remains urgent, so far as anything that merely concerns the life of the mind can be today, as opposed to sheer human survival. Sartre was moved . . .” read more

The Marxist Aesthetics of Christopher Caudwell

“For British intellectuals, the years after the economic catastrophe of 1929 were a devastating experience. Before their incredulous gaze, the old revenants of European history—mass action and the threat of revolution—turned to trouble the serenity of life under the Constitution. The certitudes of liberalism seemed unequal to these . . .” read more

Introduction to Brecht on Lukacs

“The general literary canons of Georg Lukács are by now relatively wellknown in the English-speaking world. Translations of his most important theoretical essays of the thirties have still, however, to be published. It was during this decade that Lukács, having abandoned political responsibilities in the Hungarian Communist Party, . . .” read more

Against Georg Lukacs

“I have occasionally wondered why certain essays by Georg Lukács, although they contain so much valuable material, nevertheless have something unsatisfying about them. He bases himself on a sound principle, and yet one cannot help feeling that he is somewhat remote from reality. He investigates the decline of . . .” read more

Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory

“Any modern approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin by considering the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure. From a strictly theoretical point of view this is not, in fact, where we might choose to begin. It would be in many ways preferable . . .” read more

Letters to Walter Benjamin

“Hornberg, Black Forest, 2 August 1935” read more

Introduction to Adorno

“The largely posthumous publication of his later writings has made Walter Benjamin perhaps the most influential Marxist critic in the German-speaking world, after the Second World War. The major works of his mature period have recently become available in English for the first time, with the translation of . . .” read more

Introduction to Benjamin and Brecht

“Benjamin had what Lukács so enormously lacked, a unique eye precisely for significant detail, for the marginal . . . for the impinging and unaccustomed, unschematic particularity which does not ‘fit in’ and therefore deserves a quite special and incisive attention.” read more

Conversations with Brecht

“In a conversation a few evenings ago Brecht spoke of the curious indecision which at the moment prevents him from making any definite plans. As he is the first to point out, the main reason for this indecision is that his situation is so much more privileged than . . .” read more

Art as Form of Reality

“The thesis of the end of art has become a familiar slogan: radicals take it as a truism; they reject or ‘suspend’ art as part of bourgeois culture, just as they reject or suspend its literature or philosophy. This verdict extends easily to all theory, all intelligence (no . . .” read more

Lukacs On His Life and Work

“Recent events in Europe have posed once again the problem of the relation of socialism to democracy. What are the fundamental differences for you between bourgeois democracy and revolutionary, socialist democracy?” read more

The Age of Don Quixote

“Masterpieces have a date. Today, too many theories in flight before history make the history of thought into ‘a discontinuous series of singular totalities’. But those who are not alarmed by the future dare savour to the full the draught of concrete history which every masterpiece distils for . . .” read more

Literature and Sociology: In Memory of Lucien Goldmann

“Last spring Lucien Goldmann came to Cambridge and gave two lectures. It was an opportunity for many of us to hear a man whose work we had welcomed and respected. And he said that he liked Cambridge: to have trees and fields this near to lecture-rooms. I invited . . .” read more

The Author as Producer

“Il s’agit de gagner les intellectuels `la classe ouvrière, en leur faisant prendre conscience de l’identité de leurs dé-marches spirituelles et de leurs conditions de producteur.” read more

Itinerary of a Thought

“How do you envisage the relationship between your early philosophical writings, above all L’Etre et Le Néant, and your present theoretical work, from the Critique de la Raison Dialectique onwards? In the Critique, the typical concepts of L’Etre et Le Néant have disappeared, and a completely new vocabulary . . .” read more

Lucien Goldmann: Humanist or Marxist?

“In recent years we have seen in Britain a systematic identification of Marxism with neo-Hegelianism, by left political groups and by bourgeois commentators alike. Neo-Hegelianism views society as a homogeneous totality revolving around one central contradiction; constituent elements are dissolved into an undifferentiated unity, and the internal contradictions . . .” read more

Paris, Capital of the 19th Century

“The waters are blue and the plants pink; the evening is sweet to look upon; one goes for a stroll. The great ladies are out for a stroll; behind them walk lesser ladies. Nguyen-Trong-Hiep: Paris capital of France (1897)” read more

Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) came from a Jewish bourgeois family. Born in Berlin, he spent his childhood there, studied philosophy in Freiburg, Munich and Bern, and after the First World War worked as a literary critic and essayist in Berlin and Frankfurt. When the Nazis came to power in . . .” read more

The Necessary Decision

“ten workpoints of an author in this divided world” read more

Reply to Mayer and Barrow

“Why go back to the ’twenties? This is the burden of both Logie Barrow and K. P. Mayer, though each approaches the question from a different starting-point. In reply, there are three points worth making.” read more

The Notion of Construction

“The study of literary art raises two sets of difficulties. Firstly, those pertaining to its material, to what is usually called words. Secondly, those pertaining to the principles of construction of the art.” read more

On El Lissitsky

“Logie Barrow writes: Marx’s ‘merciless criticism of all that exists’ can, as Russian formalists noted, be evolutionary as well as genetic. Some of Lissitsky’s perceptions predate those of McLuhan, but are incorporated, not into a discussion of trends as in the latter’s neon inevitabilism, but into an awareness . . .” read more

On El Lissitsky

“K. P. Mayer writes: I offer the following letter as a constructive criticism. You may unfortunately find it a bit violent in tone. I have no desire to be destructive, but because I am trying to be constructive I can see no point in mincing my words.” read more

'The Novel and Society'

“Diana Spearman: The Novel and Society. Routledge and Kegan Paul 40s.” read more

The Future of the Book

“Every artistic innovation is unique, it has no development. In time different variations on the same theme grow up around innovation, maybe higher, maybe lower, but they will rarely reach the original power of the first. This goes on until long familiarity has made the effect of the . . .” read more

Literature between Myth and Politics

“If socialist literature is to give a fuller and more comprehensive interpretation of reality than all other schools, it must systematically demythologize the countless myths that cover up man’s alienation in capitalist society. At the same time it must examine critically how far and under what conditions the . . .” read more

'On Modern Art'

“Paul Klee: On Modern Art. Faber 7s. 6d.” read more

El Lissitsky

“When we published the Jakobson-Tynyanov theses last year (nlr 37), we wished to draw attention to the confrontation of vanguard art and aesthetics with revolutionary politics and theory in the Soviet Union during the decade after the Bolshevik Revolution. El Lissitsky’s polemic on the future of the . . .” read more

'Tolstoy and the Novel'

“John Bayley: Tolstoy and the Novel. Chatto & Windus. 35s.” read more

'Character' and Henry James

“In recent years the most influential critical approach to fiction in this country has been that of Scrutiny and F. R. Leavis. Briefly, this approach grew out of the rejection by Wilson Knight and the contributors to Scrutiny of A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearian criticism. Bradley’s emphasis on ‘character’ . . .” read more

Italo Svevo

“It was Brecht, with his cynical mind, who remarked on the reluctance of 20th-century novelists and their readers to discuss the workings of business. Since this country alone publishes some eighty novels a week it is a bit difficult to generalize very reliably about them, and maybe there . . .” read more

'Dada: Art and Anti-Art'

“Dada: Art and Anti-Art. Hans Richter. Thames & Hudson. 21s. (paperback).” read more

Introduction to Jakobson-Tynyanov Theses (on Formalism)

“The Russian Formalist school of literary criticism and linguistic studies emerged shortly before the Russian revolution. The Moscow Linguistic Circle was formed in 1915; the St. Petersburg Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoyaz) in 1916. These two groups launched a savage polemical attack upon existing academic . . .” read more

Problems of Literary and Linguistic Studies

“The immediate problems confronting literary and linguistic science in Russia must be posed from a stable theoretical basis. They require a definitive abandonment of the mechanical montages which more and more frequently combine new methodological procedures with old sterile methods, and hypocritically introduce naïve psychologism and other relics . . .” read more

Butor’s You

“In The Use of Personal Pronouns in The Novel (nlr 34) Michel Butor raises the problem of the author’s relation to the characters in his novel and to the novel itself. As he demonstrates, this question has arisen through the introduction of a narrator—an ‘I’—which introduces the . . .” read more