Ideology Infiltrating Narrative Discourse?

This thesis, taking "Ideology Infiltrating Narrative Discourse?" as its main topic, studies the embodiment of ideology in narrative discourse, or to be more exact, by analyzing the narrative discourse of literary texts, tries to seek out its "ideologicality". "Ideology", however, is one of the concepts causing many disputes within Marxist tradition, and to define it consequently becomes a complex and difficult task. Therefore, before exemplifying this process, the first problem this thesis needs to deal with is the concept itself. Chapter one has a brief summary of this concept. "Ideology" is first proposed by Destutt de Tracy, a French statesman, thinker, economist and philosopher, in the eighteenth century. And up to 1950s, its definitions amount to more than 150 kinds. Critics take different stances in defining it. Karl Marx and Frederic Engles hold that ideology refers to social ideological forms representing the interests of the ruling class, and then, legitimating and naturalizing them, i.e., "false consciousness". Louis Althusser sees ideology as "the representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence". By appealing to those "Ideological State Apparatuses" (for example, religion, education, family and law, etc.), ideology "interpellates" individuals as social subjects in society. Terry Eagleton argues, ideologies are "theideas, values and feelings by which men experience their societies at various times", and "to understand ideology is to understand both the past and the present more deeply; and such understanding contributes to our liberation". These views above are helpful to our understanding of the essence of ideology. Chapter two expounds the relations of ideology with literature. This is also a problem with lasting controversies in modern thoughts. Vulgar Marxists declare that literature is ideology in an artistic form. And all people including writers therefore are the prisoners of the "false consciousness" of ideology, and consequently literature is merely the expression of a ruling class's will. Ernst Fischer, the representative of another school of theorists who take an opposite extreme, considers that "authentic art always transcends the ideological limits of its time, yielding us insight into the realities which ideology hides from view". These two views both tend to simplify the relations. However, Louis Althusser's "non-ideologicalization" of art seems more suggestive by ascribing art to "some kind of religion between 'knowledge' and ideology". Art produces a distance through its retreating from ideology, simultaneously making readers "see", "perceive" and "feel" something alluding to reality. Terry Eagleton also believes that literature is not the expression of ideology, but the representation of it with ideological writing materials by virtue of the interactions of some structures; thatliterature does not reflect the historical reality, but to produce a more real effect of it through ideology, and "history is the ultimate signifier of literature, as it is the ultimate signified". In Marxism and Literary Criticism Terry Eagleton criticizes vulgar Marxists' taking direct relationships of literature to ideology, and seeing narrative content as its immediate "reflection", regardless of several respects, such as, the author's class-position, ideological forms and their relation to literary forms, spirituality and philosophy, techniques of literary production, and aesthetic theory. And the Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukacs is also against this danger and particularly points out that "the true bearers of ideology are literary forms themselves, not the abstract content". Therefore, in this sense, to analyze art from an ideological perspective must pay more attention to its form, i.e., to seek out ideologicality from its form. A study of form also experiences a turning from in to out, i.e., from a static study of narrative structures to a dynamic study of text in connection with society, readers and ideol...