From The Speculative Totality To The Symptomatic Reading: The Contemporary Turning In The Literary Critique Of The Western Marxism

From The Speculative Totality To The Symptomatic Reading: The Contemporary Turning In The Literary Critique Of The Western MarxismZhao WenAbstract: The literary critique of the western Marxism was consciously based on the theoretical site that was different from the traditional Marxism. Along with the change of the understanding of the Marxism philosophy, the diversification of the literary critique of the western Marxism has take place. The end of this thesis is to draw an outline of the logic in this turning or diversification.The first part of the thesis takes the theory of George Lukacs' theory as the model to analyze the basic problem of the traditional western Marxism. During the process of hackles Lukacs' construction of literary history and literary theory, the thesis explain the essential relation between his aesthetic and literary idea and the Hegelian Philosophy. Lukacs' Realism was deeply stemmed in the dialectic of Dutch Classic Philosophy, which historically constructed the essential real and the bourgeoisie discourse on the concept of labor. As the obverse in the same tradition, Enster Bloch, Theodre Adorno, Herbert Marcuse were dominated by Hegelianism, too. They andLukacs all exhausted the theoretical reality in the Hegelian terms------idea/real.In the second part, the thesis explains some Althusser's key concepts, and proves that: that it's Althusser who made the western Marxism begin to reflex itself theoretical origin, that it's Althusser began to bring the western Marxism to account the spirit of Hegel. Once surpass the classic theoretical site(Althusser surpassed, because he came from the tradition constructed by Marx, Lenin and Gramsci), we can find: that Lukacs and the other empirical Hegelian Marxists were gotten in the circle of historical dialectic, that they just transformed the Marxism into scientific intuition or intuitional scientific by the basically epistemological pattern of the modern philosophy, whose essential function was to construct the Self-Subject, to find out Him, to realize His self-complacent in the mirror of this philosophy. Thiscircumstance must be changed. In order to do that, a kind of the outside critique must be introduced. Althusser's the theory of overdetermination and the method of symptomatic reading in appareils ideologiques d'Etat make this introduction. By Althusser's theory and method, A new Marxist school named Althusserian School began to come into being since 1970s. Terry Eagleton, as a representative of this school in English-spoken country, practices the symptomatic reading on the aesthetical critique, and analyzes how the problematic of Aufklarung made the thing and the sense into the aesthetic system in the Aufklarung Age.The third part uses the literary critique of Fredric Jameson to show how the Althusserian theory influences in the literary theory in a new overdeterminated historical reality. After the milestone of Althusser's theoretical creativity in the live history of Marxism, Jameson breaks the frame of real/idea in traditional western Marxism, therefore develops a kind of the special critique of the mass culture and the theory of allegorical critique.From the outline having been drawn, we can say that the diversification of the western Marxism was based on Althusser's theoretical work. And since then, in the literary critique of the western Marxism, the under development ( because of the limitation of inherent ideology in modern literary critique) has been substituted by the overdevelopment ( because of the transformation from the textual critique to the critique on system in methodology, of radical destruction of the architectonic base of Literary Critique as a modern subject in Wissenschaftslehre ) .