LITERATURE AND THE LANGUAGE OF IDEOLOGY: A STUDY IN MARXIST LITERARY THEORY

In the first two chapters of this dissertation I try to define the reasons for the unsatisfactoriness of the body of marxist literary theory to date: of the orthodox tradition because of its ambivalent textual ontology, involving the superimposition of the base/superstructure dichotomy on that of form/content; and of the neo-hegelian tradition (in particular Lukacs, Goldmann, Adorno and Benjamin) because it thinks the category of mediation through a conception of history as an expressive totality.;Russian Formalist theory (especially Tynjanov) provides two important elements to a theory of the literary system: the diachronic dimension of the system, based on the discontinuous, non-teleological process of deviation from the norm; and the concept of automatisation. If the latter is seen, not as an automatic process but as a social process (the appropriation of elements into the ideological field), then we can think of literary evolution in terms which mediate the social and historical situation of the text and its 'immanent' value.;The relation of the literary text to the authority of the ideological system (and so, indirectly, to social relations of power) can be grasped as a structural moment through the intertextual relation which is set up to the (internalised) literary canon. The automatised canon functions metonymically as a symbolic condensation of the whole ideological system of which it is a part (it is overdetermined within the literary series).;Such a theory of the mediated immanence of social contradictions in the structure of the text would provide a solution to the problem of the 'autonomy' of the diachronic sequence and of the direction of change. But it would need to be historically specified according to different structures of literary production (it would have no general validity).;The remainder of the dissertation explores the possible categories of a marxist understanding of the literary system. The crucial need here is for a more complex conception of ideology. I define ideology as a semiotic system, a coherent symbolic order distinct from the level of social relations of production but adding its symbolic power to social power-relations. Literature is structured dialectically on the 'language-system' of ideology (of which it itself is a part); ideology constitutes the 'horizon' of the literary text, but the text is situated in a separate system with its own relative autonomy.;The literary system is seen, then, as a process of interaction between systemic norm and deviation. This norm is established by the institutionalisation of successive receptions (interpretations), and interpretation is therefore an objective moment of the realisation of a work. The hermeneutic problem of the 'survival' of works beyond their original situation in a determinate system can't be solved in abstraction from the historical processes by which the work is incorporated into new systems -- a process which depends not a force within the work but on the needs (e.g. for 'continuity') and structures of these systems. The hermeneutic situation is a situation with regard to the authority of the literary canon (an authority which is ultimately an instance of the hegemony of a dominant class). The (re-)politicisation of this situation involves questions of use rather than 'meaning', and pushes into the foreground the question of the institutional determinations of reading.