Georg Lukács And Western Marxist Criticism

Georg Lukács had a tortuous and complicated life,and his thoughts turned many times in his life. However, at the beginning of writing,he took the study of literary criticism and aesthetics as his life and wrote voluminous critical works. Rene Wellek, the famous literary theorist and critic, called Georg Lukács, Benedetto Croce, Paul Valery and Roman Ingarden as the most famous critics in the 20th century.Lukács had occupied an extremely important position in the history of Western literary criticism of the 20th century. And it seems to be an established fact without too much argument. But which thoughtS had been inherited on earth, and how his thoughts had been absorbed to construct their own system of literary theory by others? All of these need us to study deeply. In fact, the course of the literary thoughts of Lukács absorbed by the critical theory of Western Marxism was also the course of a re-constructed process of the thoughts of Lukács. Exploration in this direction should be researched continuously.My dissertation can be divided into four parts, such as introduction, four chapters, conclusion and major references.A detailed review on the present studies of Lukács literary criticism has been summarized in the introduction, and some necessary prerequisites have been shown about the value, the research methods and the basic contents of this research.Some systematical analysis of the literary criticism of Georg Lukács would be done in the first two chapters of this thesis. The thoughts of Lukács could be divided into the early period and the latter period according to the time that Lukács joined the Communist Party in 1918 as the boundary. Then the dissertations would be expanded in some important issues of literary criticism in deferent periods.Chapter 1 deals with the early literary criticism of Lukács.The internal connection between the modernity and literary form is the consistent theme in the three important works in the early period, which is A History of the Development of Modern Darma, Soul and Form and The Theory of the Novel. By being compared with the tragedy and the epic, the position of novel in modern society was established by Lukács.Lukács believed that the only literary form to act as a form of modern mind is the novel, so he called novel the"epic of evil era". Actually, novel reveals the shaping and construction of the totality of life and searches the meaning for the life, and it is a mature male art form.Its internal form is a"problematisch"and individual self-completion.Its external form is the biography.The structure principle is the irony. According to the narrow or broad relations between the soul and the outside worlds, Lukács analyzed the typology of the novel and proposed three types under the affections of the religious typology studies of Weber. Lukács's novel typology attempts had a full of enlightening significance although there was some bias in the analysis in the special writer and special works. His totality theory, the salvation function of novel in the"absolute evil"period and the interaction between literary form and society have profoundly affected the future of the Western Marxism and the contemporary western literary theory.Chapter 2 discusses the latter realism literary thoughts of Lukács. There were lots of traces of Hegelian aesthetics logical reasoning in Lukács'earlier works, so the concept of history must be introduced to replace these purely logical reasoning. When he turned to be a Marxist, Georg Lukács recognized that the abstract and isolated individual was not enough to give a full meaning to the world, and only the history was the real"subject". It was known that the traces of totality only could be found in the history. It is the mission of novel. Novel with its narrative form should be involved into the construction of the total culture.Then Lukács began a comprehensive and lasting study of the European realism literary, and gave a sharp criticism to the modern literature. There is no doubt that Lukács's discussion of realism was very profound, but it was an undoubted radical approach to completely negate the modernism on the side of realism.Chapter 3 is about the relation between Lukács and Western Marxist Literary Criticism. It shows that Lukács's thoughts has been an organic component of the Western Marxism.His literary thoughts was incorporated and assimilated into the development of western literary theory. In this chapter, some comparison between Lukács and other Western Marxist has been made to analyze the origin and interaction among them. In the fact, the process of re-construction of Lukács's thoughts is the process that it was absorbed by the Western Marxism literary theory ,too.There was an intrinsic consistency between Lukács and the members of the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, T.W.Adorno, and so on. Benjamin's literary theory had a strong romantic anti-capitalist tendency affected by Lukács's The Theory of the Novel. Marcuse pointed that the art was the resistance from naturalism and desires .Art reflects existence of humans based on the assertions that Lukács endowed art with personal qualities. Adorno accepted the"reification"theory of Lukács and deduced a set of comprehensive and materialistic theory of popular literature. Under the influences of Lukács, Adorno took over this form and became the master of Essay style.Lukács had been regarded as a spiritual mentor by Lucian Goldman. And some ideas in Soul and Form,especially the arguments in the"tragedy of metaphysics", were directly used to explain the tragic world view of Racine and Pascal by Goldman.Goldman accepted the concept that the protagonist was"problematic"individual and he pointed that the development of novel had gone through three phases associating with the three stages of the development of the social structure.In the view of the realism issue, the"New Realism"vision of Raymond Williams emphasized the dynamic balance of individual and social elements in realism literary, as same as the"Great Realism"of Lukács, and even some scholars regarded Williams as the"British Lukács".The critical realism literary tradition of the nineteenth century was also respected by Williams. However, there were some differences between Lukács and Williams. Although Williams insisted realistic literature, he did not consider that the realist models of the 19th century was eternal, fixed standards. The new realism theory of Williams downplayed the"social class conflict"that emphasized by Lukács.Jameson inherited the ideas about totality of Lukács, and proposed an infinite totality theory under the deepened and broadened studies. Under the inspiring of Lukács, Jameson showed that how the text contained a kind of"political unconscious", and how to explain them with literary interpretations. In the last section of Chapter 3, the attribution of Lukács is discussed. The author believes that Lukács did not abandon the classical Marxism in essence. It is not true to classify Lukács as a"Western Marxism". Although there are some agreements in the literary theory and the criticism theory between Lukács and other western Marxism, we can not erase their differences in the deeper lever.Chapter 4 summarizes and evaluates the literary criticism of Lukács. His theory has an important historical role although there are some limitations. Any theory would not be a ultimate truth. I believe that there are not only distinctive features but also undeniable limitations. Firstly, the narrow interests in literature made that the objectivity of his research had been limited mostly to narrative literature just like novel, and he apparently overlooked the other types of literature. Because of this, his literary theory and literary criticism was inevitable showed significant limitations and one-sidedness, and this also affected his appreciation and evaluation of other types of art in a certain extent. Secondly, although Lukács had stressed the importance of the dialectics of totality, he did not find a suitable method to use this principle in his practices of literary criticism. His theory was only an abstract romanticism. More over, Lukács seemed too persistent even rigescent in dealing with the relation between the literary form and the reality content. On one hand, he claimed that the artistic forms should change according to the changing social reality, and the realism should encourage a wide variety of artistic forms, on the other hand, he thoroughly denied the realism as a new artistic form, which was undoubtedly self-contradictory.In the end, I trace the footprints of Lukács's literary theory which traveling in China and study the process that was more interesting and tortuous from being rejected to being accepted in china which was very different in the thinking models and ideology from the western world.