| This dissertation explores the relationship between Marxist dialectics, literary theories and literary criticism. It illustrates their logical and consequential link and analyzes and evaluates their claim to scientificity. Part One treats the Hegelian Marxists, Georg Lukacs, Lucien Goldmann and Theodor Adorno, who believe that Marx rejected Hegel's idealistic system but adopted his dialectics. Part Two deals with the views of the non-Hegelian Marxists, Galvano Della Volpe, Lucio Colletti, Louis Althusser, and the Althusserians, Pierre Macherey and Terry Eagleton. Della Volpe, Colletti and Althusser maintain that Marx's inversion of Hegel's dialectics meant the recovery of the logical principle of non-contradiction, the abolition of the a priori scheme of the theory of alienation and the establishing therefore of the positivity of matter. Part Three evaluates dialectics, literary theories and criticism. First, in establishing the validity of the different interpretations of dialectics, two views will be presented: one that maintains that Marx's dialectics is scientific by pointing out that it operates with real, ontological categories; the other which considers the dialectics faulted by a strong unscientific Hegelian framework: the theory of alienation. Lastly, in assessing the literary theories and criticism, it will be shown that, notwithstanding their merits, their epistemological import is undermined by a strong foundational idealistic presupposition. They assume that literary writings share some formal properties or essence. The first step then for a truly materialistic understanding of literary writings is to free the concept of literary practice from eternal, unchanging epistemological and aesthetic forms of cognition. At the end, however, such an understanding will show the politics of literary criticism including its own. Two questions will be discussed: can the Marxist-political analysis still claim cognitive supremacy over other literary interpretations, and if it cannot, is it true or better by virtue of its politics?... |
