Book contents
- After Marx
- After Series
- After Marx
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Black Marxism and the Antinomies of Racial Capitalism
- Chapter 2 Eco-Criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies
- Chapter 3 Screening Insurrection: Marx, Cinema, Revolution
- Chapter 4 Marxist Ecology and Shakespeare
- Chapter 5 There Is No “More Commodification”: Periodizing Capitalist Transformation
- Chapter 6 The Irreconcilable: Marx after Literature
- Chapter 7 The Rise and Fall of the English-Language Literary Novel since World War II
- Chapter 8 Literature and the State
- Chapter 9 Post-Soviet Aesthetics
- Chapter 10 Lu Xun’s Literary Revolution in Chinese Marxism
- Chapter 11 Latin American Literature and Dependency Theory Today
- Chapter 12 Industry Culture: Labor and Technology in Marxist Critical Theory
- Chapter 13 In Service to Capital: Theater and Marxist Cultural Theory
- Chapter 14 Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism
- Chapter 15 Poetry and Revolution
- Index
- References
Chapter 8 - Literature and the State
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2022
Book contents
- After Marx
- After Series
- After Marx
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Black Marxism and the Antinomies of Racial Capitalism
- Chapter 2 Eco-Criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies
- Chapter 3 Screening Insurrection: Marx, Cinema, Revolution
- Chapter 4 Marxist Ecology and Shakespeare
- Chapter 5 There Is No “More Commodification”: Periodizing Capitalist Transformation
- Chapter 6 The Irreconcilable: Marx after Literature
- Chapter 7 The Rise and Fall of the English-Language Literary Novel since World War II
- Chapter 8 Literature and the State
- Chapter 9 Post-Soviet Aesthetics
- Chapter 10 Lu Xun’s Literary Revolution in Chinese Marxism
- Chapter 11 Latin American Literature and Dependency Theory Today
- Chapter 12 Industry Culture: Labor and Technology in Marxist Critical Theory
- Chapter 13 In Service to Capital: Theater and Marxist Cultural Theory
- Chapter 14 Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism
- Chapter 15 Poetry and Revolution
- Index
- References
Summary
After locating two distinct Marxist aesthetic traditions – Lenin's claim that a “party literature” can be free or autonomous because it doesn’t have to answer to capitalist constraints, and another less optimistic tradition that argues that as art is a commodity, it is all about capitalist constraints – this chapter argues for a third one that presumes there is much to gain by putting Marxist and anarchist theories of literature closer together than they often are. The chapter first recounts how the Bolsheviks turned a resistant literature into a state literature after the Russian revolution. It then traces this understanding through the Cold War, pointing out how it also shaped the relationship that the US state has to literature. The conclusion argues for a Marxist aesthetic that is not based on the Soviet example, but one based instead on revolutionary moments such as Russian Revolution or the Paris Commune or the anticolonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
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- Information
- After MarxLiterature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 131 - 142Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
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