Sociology of Literature - Neo-Marxian Ideology Critique

Neo-Marxian Ideology Critique

Marx used the term ideology to denote the inner connectedness of culture, including literature, and class. The philosopher Louis Althusser elaborated on this notion in the early 1970s, arguing that ideology functions so as to constitute biological individuals as social 'subjects' by representing their imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence.

For Althusser himself art was not ideology. But his theory was applied to literature by Macherey in France, Eagleton in Britain and Jameson in the United States. The central novelty of Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology was its argument that literature could be understood as 'producing' ideology, in the sense of performing it. Jameson's The Political Unconscious argued that literary analysis can be focussed on three distinct levels, 'text', 'ideologeme' and 'ideology of form', each of which has its socio-historical corollary, in the equivalent 'semantic horizon' of political history, society and mode of production. The version of ideology Jameson applies to all three levels is essentially Althusserian. The novelty of his position, however, was to argue for a 'double hermeneutic' simultaneously concerned with ideology and utopia.

Macherey, Eagleton and Jameson were literary critics by profession, but their applications of ideology-critique to literature are sociological in character, insofar as they seek to explain literary phenomena in extra-literary terms.