Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

English Language and Literature Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Marxism

Discipline
Institution
Publication Year
Publication
Publication Type

Articles 1 - 30 of 34

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

“Class And Consciousness”: An Application Of Marxist Theory And Posthumanism To Kazuo Ishiguro’S The Remains Of The Day, Never Let Me Go And Klara And The Sun, Renee Elizabeth Samuel May 2024

“Class And Consciousness”: An Application Of Marxist Theory And Posthumanism To Kazuo Ishiguro’S The Remains Of The Day, Never Let Me Go And Klara And The Sun, Renee Elizabeth Samuel

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s works are introspective explorations of how one’s prescribed role in society shapes one’s identity; this self-reflection is evident in three of his novels, The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and Klara and the Sun. All three novels heavily rely on the point of view of a member of the subservient class, and this perspective provides insight into the unnamed hierarchies within society and the relationship, or lack thereof, between divided classes. Despite their similarities in structure, each novel explores class relationships in different ways. The Remains of the Day focuses on an individual living …


Final Master's Portfolio, Savannah Packman May 2024

Final Master's Portfolio, Savannah Packman

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio uses Marxist and feminist film theory to analyze various forms of visual media. It analyzes Mark Mylod's film The Menu (2022), Julie Taymor's film Across the Universe (2007), the historic V-J Day Kiss photograph, and popular TikTok videos. This portfolio focuses on the impact of capitalism in the political and economic sphere. It also analyzes images of women throughout history and critiques how these images have been used to formulate the American body politic.


Trapped In Time: Examining The Academy's Temporal Confines In The Works Of James Joyce And Sally Rooney, Alice Condry-Power Dec 2023

Trapped In Time: Examining The Academy's Temporal Confines In The Works Of James Joyce And Sally Rooney, Alice Condry-Power

English Honors Theses

In this paper, I propose that James Joyce reveals the ways in which artists registered the rising imposition of public time within schools which subsequently contributed to the mechanization of art and an emphasis on original production. Then, Sally Rooney helps us to see that these anxieties are still present in what Ian Kidd has labeled our “culture of speed” (339). Like the literary modernists, we are afraid that humans have been mechanized with the sole motivation of efficient production which leaves no time for creative thought and innovation. In response to these concerns, we have placed a great amount …


Ecocriticism And The Young Adult Audience In Dry And The Islands At The End Of The World, Nicole Marie Sysyn Jan 2023

Ecocriticism And The Young Adult Audience In Dry And The Islands At The End Of The World, Nicole Marie Sysyn

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis focuses on exploring and analyzing two young adult novels through an ecocritical lens. The authors of the young adult novels, Dry and The Islands at the End of the Earth, bring awareness to young readers about the progression of global warming and effects this devastation has on humans and animals. Both of these novels show character’s relationships with nature, decision making skills in terms of crisis, and coping mechanisms which can translate to young readers. There is a great balance of teaching young readers the importance of their own relationship with the environment and how to cope in …


Get Rich And Die Trying: Capitalism, Its Repetitions, And The Financial Plot, Richard Chapman Matis Jan 2023

Get Rich And Die Trying: Capitalism, Its Repetitions, And The Financial Plot, Richard Chapman Matis

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Most people want to be rich, and the reasons why usually do not require exposition. Despite gospel warnings about the difficulties of the wealthy entering paradise, multitudes clamor for the possibility of facing this dilemma firsthand. Tales from antiquity and mythologies utilize recognizable archetypes such as the profligate spender or stubborn miser that are still employed as rote moral instruction today. In one sense, exchangeability between positions of rich and poor is a staple of social storytelling because of its universal mutual intelligibility across time and place. Modern readers can likely identify descriptors and coding of rich and poor, despite …


Phantasms Of Hope: The Utopian Function Of Fantasy Literature, Alexander C. Morgan Oct 2021

Phantasms Of Hope: The Utopian Function Of Fantasy Literature, Alexander C. Morgan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Fantasy literature has long been considered an inherently conservative genre. However, Ernst Bloch’s Marxist theory of a utopian anticipatory consciousness and his concept of nonsynchronism recognize a progressive, utopian function within the archetypes and allegories of fairy tales, a precursor to modern fantasy. Bloch argues that archetypes are not static entities and can be repurposed to critique the world contemporary to a text’s production. Even archetypes produced under a past mode of production, like those used in fantasy, can therefore be anticipatory and utopian. By extending Bloch’s utopian function to include fantasy and integrating his philosophy with the historical-materialist hermeneutic …


The Circulatory Process And User-Data, Matthew Greene Jan 2021

The Circulatory Process And User-Data, Matthew Greene

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The mass production of commodities has traditionally been the locus through which surplus-value and the exploitation of labor under capitalism has been examined; however, the material conditions of the twenty-first century has allowed for the appearance of new forms of labor to occur which have the capacity to create surplus-value outside of the direct production process. This thesis analyzes how the circulatory process has always had the ability to produce surplus-value, but it was not until the vast advancements made in the means of transportation and communication that this would become a commonplace practice. This work seeks to examine how …


Levine's Marxist Toys, Gary Dean Engle Oct 2020

Levine's Marxist Toys, Gary Dean Engle

IdeaFest: Interdisciplinary Journal of Creative Works and Research from Cal Poly Humboldt

No abstract provided.


Colonialism And Globalism In Two Contemporary Southern Appalachian Novels - Serena (2008) By Ron Rash, And Flight Behavior (2012) By Barbara Kingsolver, Jasmyn Herrell May 2020

Colonialism And Globalism In Two Contemporary Southern Appalachian Novels - Serena (2008) By Ron Rash, And Flight Behavior (2012) By Barbara Kingsolver, Jasmyn Herrell

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this essay, I investigate how the historic and current economic structures operating in Appalachia from the 1920s to the 2010s are represented in two contemporary Southern Appalachian novels – Serena (2008) by Ron Rash and Flight Behavior (2012) by Barbara Kingsolver. Through the lens of postcolonial theory, I show how Serena represents Appalachia as functioning under the colonial model outlined by Robert Blauner and Helen Mathews Lewis in 1978. Then, still under the theory of postcolonialism, I explore how Kingsolver’s work depicts regional identity in response to a post-colonial environment and the ever-expanding global economy.


On Ways Of Studying Tolkien: Notes Toward A Better (Epic) Fantasy Criticism, Dennis Wilson Wise Mar 2020

On Ways Of Studying Tolkien: Notes Toward A Better (Epic) Fantasy Criticism, Dennis Wilson Wise

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article examines major academic approaches used in the study of J.R.R. Tolkien. It argues that certain themes from political philosopher Leo Strauss, by helping us to develop a new theoretical lens, can elucidate several politically salient aspects of Tolkien's work, including thymos and his dialectic between ancient and modern. Four previous (though flawed) Straussian interpretations of Tolkien are highlighted. Finally, by analyzing the tensions that arise when pairing critical theory and its attendant bias against nature with Tolkien and epic fantasy, this article argues for the timeliness of a Straussian lens for studying fantasy and Tolkien alike.


Nine Stories And The Society Of The Spectacle: An Exploration Into The Alienation Of The Individual In The Post-War Era, Margaret E. Geddy Jan 2020

Nine Stories And The Society Of The Spectacle: An Exploration Into The Alienation Of The Individual In The Post-War Era, Margaret E. Geddy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the thematic links between three of J. D. Salinger’s short stories published in Nine Stories (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Down at the Dinghy,” and “Teddy”), ultimately arguing that it is a short-story cycle rooted in the quandary posed by the suicide of Seymour Glass. This conclusion is reached by assessing the influence of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” on these stories, something that is understood through the Marxist frame of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.


Improving Student Learning: An English Teacher’S Research, Planning, And Analysis Journey, Rachel Lantz May 2019

Improving Student Learning: An English Teacher’S Research, Planning, And Analysis Journey, Rachel Lantz

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This final portfolio was submitted to the English Department of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the field of English with a specialization in English Teaching. The projects contained in the portfolio exhibit the journey of research, planning and analysis. The portfolio contains: a substantive research paper, a teaching based project, a combination of a substantial research and a teaching-based project, and a literary theory paper.


The City As A Trap: 20th And 21st Century American Literature And The American Myth Of Mobility, Andrew Joseph Hoffmann Apr 2019

The City As A Trap: 20th And 21st Century American Literature And The American Myth Of Mobility, Andrew Joseph Hoffmann

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation reads twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. multicultural literatures, women’s literature, and science-fiction film and literature to identify a tradition of literary representation of long-standing patterns of economic entrapment in American cities.” I argue that the capitalist ideologies of opportunity and spatial, economic, and social mobility associated with American cities have been largely false promises, and that literature provides an avenue to investigate the ideological matrices and cultural narratives that American capitalism uses to situate bodies where it needs them, primarily in urban centers. I claim that this entrapment remains more or less a constant in American cities despite …


Under The Sign Of Suicide, Theodore Emmanuel Prassinos Jan 2019

Under The Sign Of Suicide, Theodore Emmanuel Prassinos

Wayne State University Dissertations

“Under the Sign of Suicide,” examines modernist writers’ intense and sustained preoccupation with and representations of suicide. Beyond numerous essays on the topic, we also find many fictional characters such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Svidrigailov and Kirilov both taken by gunshot, Stavrogin and Smerdyakov both by hanging. We also find Franz Kafka’s George Bendemann who takes his life by drowning, and Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Smith by impaling, Her character, Rhoda, dies off a cliff. In American literature, we find Edna Pontellier, Quentin Compson, Clare Kendry, Semour Glass, Teddy McArdle, Willy Loman, Tod Clifton, and on and on. This list is surely …


Re-Vision And Re-Representation : An Exploration Of Awarness And Voice In Marxism, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism And Psychoanalytic Theory, Stacy Sexton Jan 2019

Re-Vision And Re-Representation : An Exploration Of Awarness And Voice In Marxism, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism And Psychoanalytic Theory, Stacy Sexton

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Awareness and voice are explored through case studies of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Karl Marx’s unaware and voiceless lumpenproletariat, Gayatri Spivak’s possibly aware but voiceless subaltern, and Saul Williams’ losers are compared. Williams’ loser may or may not have access to and engage in re-vision and re-representation, since the loser may exist at any point along the continuum of awareness and voice. Capitalism and the superstructure make everyone a loser. Thus, there is an inherent solidarity among losers, and it is this solidarity that may bring re-vision and re-representation to those who are unaware and voiceless. Unlike the …


On The Fringes: The Monsters, The Voiceless, The Abominations, And The Exiled, Virginia Davis Wyeth Jul 2018

On The Fringes: The Monsters, The Voiceless, The Abominations, And The Exiled, Virginia Davis Wyeth

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Peripheral characters/characteristics frequently serve to highlight the problematic societal situation of marginalized groups, even though these characters on the fringes of the text or main characters with unusual attributes are seemingly irrelevant to the primary plot. This portfolio examines, through a teaching unit, the monster archetype and its representation as a means to suppress Other or other within ourselves. The literary analysis pieces also examine the repression of historically marginalized groups, such as women, homosexuals, and children. And the last piece even takes a look at what happens when powerful groups are usurped by socio-economic and cultural shifts.


Understanding The American Subaltern: An Exploration Of Complex Literary Characters Through Socio-Cultural Lenses, Sophie Gioffre Jul 2018

Understanding The American Subaltern: An Exploration Of Complex Literary Characters Through Socio-Cultural Lenses, Sophie Gioffre

English Summer Fellows

This project involves the analysis of three novels — Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Ann Petry’s The Street, and Toni Morrison’s Sula — featuring main characters who are forced to navigate realistic socio-economic environments rooted in racist, sexist, and classist systems of oppression in the United States of America. Through the process of completing close-readings of the novels, conducting extensive secondary research on historical contexts, and examining other scholarly criticisms and interpretations of these novels, I develop new insights into the main characters’ plights. To transfer this conceptual understanding into a more personal and empathetic …


New Perspectives On Paul And Marx: William Blake's <">The Chimney Sweeper<"> In <<>I>Songs Of Innocence And Experience<<>/I>, Lianna Jean Manibog Apr 2018

New Perspectives On Paul And Marx: William Blake's <">The Chimney Sweeper<"> In <<>I>Songs Of Innocence And Experience<<>/I>, Lianna Jean Manibog

Theses and Dissertations

New Perspectives on Paul and Marx: William Blakes œThe Chimney Sweeper in Songs of Innocence and ExperienceLianna Jean Rose ManibogDepartment of English, BYUMaster of Arts This article explores the function of religion in socio-political spheres. Karl Marx is famously against religion in all its various capacities, arguing that it is a tool used by power structures to control the masses. William Blake, the British poet, is also seen as critical of religion, and because of this his works are often read through a Marxist lens. And yet depictions of Blake as a staunchly anti-religious man dont seem to fit with …


Socialism And Fantasy: China Miéville’S Fables Of Race And Class, Christopher Kendrick Feb 2018

Socialism And Fantasy: China Miéville’S Fables Of Race And Class, Christopher Kendrick

Christopher Kendrick

No abstract provided.


Ideology In Literature And Literature As Ideology: Totalitarian And Reactionary Appropriation Of Resistant Texts, Huntley Hughes Jan 2018

Ideology In Literature And Literature As Ideology: Totalitarian And Reactionary Appropriation Of Resistant Texts, Huntley Hughes

Master’s Theses

This thesis seeks to explore the means by which nominally or potentially resistant texts are appropriated into violent or exploitative political structures for propaganda and profit. In the first chapter two pre-soviet Russian novels closely associated with the radical tradition are examined, through the lens of literary analysis, in order to uncover the ways in which ideologically egalitarian revolutionary movements can degenerate into authoritarian regimes. The second chapter is concerned with a Welsh text, How Green Was My Valley, which, despite being concerned with the conditions of the Welsh mining class, utilizes the narrative form of childhood recollection to insidiously …


Socialism And Fantasy: China Miéville’S Fables Of Race And Class, Christopher Kendrick Feb 2016

Socialism And Fantasy: China Miéville’S Fables Of Race And Class, Christopher Kendrick

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.


The Literary Unconscious: Ideology And Utopia In The Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel In England And Russia, Isra Ahmed Daraiseh Jul 2015

The Literary Unconscious: Ideology And Utopia In The Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel In England And Russia, Isra Ahmed Daraiseh

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this volume, I have examined a number of works of nineteenth-century realist fiction from England and Russia, using the double interpretive method recommended by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious. In particular, I have employed the dialectical double hermeneutic suggested by Jameson, who argues that the most productive approach to literary texts is to consider them from the double perspective of ideology and utopia. That is, critics should approach literary texts by seeking out the ideological roots that lie beneath the textual surface and from which the texts grow, while at the same time keeping a careful eye out …


The Grimm Brothers: An Interpretation Of Capitalistic Demands And Desires, Rebecca Cicalese Apr 2015

The Grimm Brothers: An Interpretation Of Capitalistic Demands And Desires, Rebecca Cicalese

Senior Capstone Theses

This paper explores how Marxism, particularly the teachings of Karl Marx, are echoed in lesser-known Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales. I will focus on “The Maiden without Hands,” “The Juniper Tree,” and “The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear.” My overall argument is that within the mystical world the Grimm Brothers create in their legendary fairy tales, components of Marxism exist and are purposefully written into the stories. As seen through the eyes of both Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, the society existing within the fairy tales are commodity based. The “monsters” are seen as the laborers who must comply with …


"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros Jan 2015

"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Writing from a specifically Black postmodern perspective, former death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal composes his multimedia slave narrative as a postmodern Neo-slave narrative. From the Atlantic slave-trade to the United States prison-industrial complex, from Quobna Ottobah Cugoano to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the slave narrative exists as a critique against oppressive State powers and a collective affirmation of interiority and embodied significance. For Abu-Jamal, his incarceration is indicative of an ever-pervasive capitalist power-structure that in the past has, in the present is, and in the future will control designated groups of made marginalized masses in order that preeminent capitalist beneficiaries preserve elite …


Mirrors Of Mechanized Man: Capitalism And Intertextuality As Represented In The Works Of Herman Melville, Franz Kafka And Don Delillo, Samantha J. Amberson-Dominguez Aug 2014

Mirrors Of Mechanized Man: Capitalism And Intertextuality As Represented In The Works Of Herman Melville, Franz Kafka And Don Delillo, Samantha J. Amberson-Dominguez

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

It is contended that literature, as a product of the socioeconomic conditions in which it was generated, can be used to explore the relationship between individuals and technological advancement, as existing within specific stages of capitalism’s development. Using Marxist analysis to examine texts generated during the cultural eras of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, it is argued that physical, mental, and emotional state of characters, as represented within works written by Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, and Don DeLillo, respectively, reflect the increasing levels of human alienation as experienced by individuals under the constraining forces of market capitalism, imperialism, and late capitalism.


Review Of Darko Suvin's Defined By A Hollow: Essays On Utopia, Science Fiction And Political Epistemology, Gerry Canavan Jul 2013

Review Of Darko Suvin's Defined By A Hollow: Essays On Utopia, Science Fiction And Political Epistemology, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

This review considers Darko Suvin’s recent career anthology Defined by a Hollow with respect to debates about the relevance of Marxism and utopian critique in the context of a global neoliberal hegemony that (twenty years after Fukuyama) still imagines itself as the ‘end of history’. Suvin’s work suggests that the relationship between Marxism and aesthetics in such times is not simply a quirk of the academy, but is in fact a politically necessary conjoining of materialist praxis and quasi-religious inspiration.


Country Of Illusion: Imagined Geographies And Transnational Connections In F. Scott Fitzgerald's America, Charles Mitchell Frye Iii Jan 2012

Country Of Illusion: Imagined Geographies And Transnational Connections In F. Scott Fitzgerald's America, Charles Mitchell Frye Iii

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The two decades between World Wars I and II were a remarkably isolationist, xenophobic period in the history of American politics and culture. In the era’s literature, however, some US authors repurposed regional writing as a medium for rethinking conservative nationalism and for imagining their country’s place in the emerging global community. F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose career successes and failures mirrored the parabolic national pattern of Boom and Bust, was one such author. Though his works have seldom been interpreted through a regionalist lens, Fitzgerald lived in and wrote about every major American section, often planting tropes of transregional and …


Sublime Beauty & Horrible Fucking Things - The Finer Worlds Of Warren Ellis, William James Allred Dec 2011

Sublime Beauty & Horrible Fucking Things - The Finer Worlds Of Warren Ellis, William James Allred

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work constitutes an in-depth discussion of the muted postmodern characteristics of contemporary comics writer and novelist Warren Ellis, highlighting his major long-form works within comics, Planetary, Transmetropolitan, StormWatch, and The Authority, as well as several shorter works such as Ocean, Orbiter, and Global Frequency. In addition, Ellis is situated within the British science fiction tradition, specifically, the British Boom movement which contains other comics writers such as Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore.


Marxism And Language, Tony Crowley Jan 2008

Marxism And Language, Tony Crowley

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


After Scotland: Irvine Welsh And The Ethic Of Emergence, Benjamin George Lanier-Nabors Jan 2005

After Scotland: Irvine Welsh And The Ethic Of Emergence, Benjamin George Lanier-Nabors

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In “After Scotland: Irvine Welsh and the Ethic of Emergence,” the author’s objective is to mirror what he argues is the Scottish writer Irvine Welsh’s objective: to chart out a future Scotland guided by a generative life ethic. In order to achieve this objective, the author lays open and reengages Scotland’s past, discovers and commits to neglected or submerged materials and energies in its past, demonstrates how Welsh’s work is faithful to those and newly produced materials and energies, and suggests that Welsh’s use of those materials and energies enables readers to envision a new Scotland that will be integral …