Reflections in the Brain: Marxism and Criticism

Engels clarified for Ernest Bloch the relationship of economics to other social factors in historical materialism: while “the production and reproduction of actual life alone [is] the determining factor” it “is [not] the only decisive one.” “Different parts” of economic structure account for material history, too—its political forms, laws, even the “reflections...in the brains” of individuals count. (Engels) It's by analyzing these “reflections” that historical materialists since Marx and Engels have considered literature’s contribution to social reproduction. Yet, this project has created its own question: how does historical materialism account for its own historical positioning? This is what Fredric Jameson described as a crossroads. Should the critic prioritize “the path of the [literary] object”—the historical origins of the text—or “the path of the subject,” the “more intangible historicity of the concepts through which we interpret?” (Jameson 9) He suggests that critics can’t do both. What Daniel Hartley calls the politics of style emerges when historical materialism turns its attention to the act of criticism, posing the question: if literature is part of material history, then literature about literature is too; and if both literatures emerge the same way, how does the critic distance their analysis from the contradictions of the past? Thus, the history of the question of literature’s role in social reproduction links inevitably to the question of the critic’s own position in history.  

In what follows, I want to focus on the centrality of this question, to show how historical materialist criticism is always, and at the same time, an attempt to synthesize “the path of the object” with “the path of the subject.” As Paul Hamilton argues, when studying the history which makes possible a text, the critic is made aware of their “own assumptions and methods.” Setting the text “in context… [is] like learning the language in which it speaks.” But “the greater our proficiency in that language the more conscious we become of the variety of senses” in which the text “may be taken.” This multiplicity also makes us aware of our own historicity; the critic can only select an interpretation “on grounds expressing [their] own… preoccupations.” (Hamilton 16) And therefore, any reading is a matter of relativizing the text and its history to the interpreter’s own concepts. Hence, the way critics have wrangled with literature’s role in social reproduction has demonstrated an epistemological tension within the project of hermeneutics. This essay explores how key moments in the historical materialist tradition—Lukacs’ use of historical totality, Jameson’s dialectical method, New Historicism’s subjective reading, and New Formalism’s return to form—reflect this unresolved, yet productive tension.  

This begins with Marx. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, he gives two ways of understanding the politics of aesthetic form: 1.) as emerging from and symptomatic of material history; and 2.) as useful for characterizing the shape of history itself. Real historical change occurs at “epochs of…crisis,” (Marx 36) generating heroes and symbols like “the Apostle Paul” or “The Roman empire.” (ibid) These are picked up by subsequent movements “to exalt new struggles” and “recover the spirit of revolution.”1 But Marx is interested in how the shape of history itself contains this process—what is the aesthetic of a past composed of such symbols? He settles on farce. The reuse of dramatic narratives signal the absence of heroism in bourgeois society and, as history progresses, this comedic failure becomes a condition for revolution. The fact that the French had turned back to the symbols of Napolean and ancient Rome meant revolution was nigh.  

But how to describe this revolution? If aesthetic forms are produced by history, what is the future drama or symbol of something that hasn’t happened yet? For Marx, it's an impossible question: “the content” of revolution “transcends the phrase” of any poetry we possess. (38) But how does one begin to act in history without the confidence they are not replaying farce? As Hamilton points out, Marx  

can describe how he believes [the poetry of the future] must happen in theory, [but] can he envisage it with the language at his disposal? Must he not, in all consistency, historicize his own understanding and concede the extent to which, on his own view, his conceptions, however revolutionary, are dominated by the idioms of the past? (92)  

To reformulate this in literary terms: if the aesthetic is both emergent from historical conditions and a means by which to understand them, a historical materialist criticism must answer both how literature socially reproduces mental attitudes in history, but also how its own mental attitudes characterize them as history. This places the critic somewhere between the poetry of the past and the poetry of the future, possibly leaving unanswered the question of what the aesthetics of progressive criticism are.  

This tension Marx leaves for later generations to resolve. It is explicated in the thought of Georg Lukacs, but also in the process of his thought as it changed and developed. His early, pre-Marxist Theory of The Novel contrasts modern fiction to ancient epic. The latter “gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from within…” (Lukacs 189, 2000) a totality emergent from ancient culture’s “transcendent world-structure.” (188) The novel, on the other hand, developing from modern, liberal society, “seeks…to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life.” (189) Hence, the “highest freedom that can be achieved…” in the novel is “irony,” the awareness that one is seeking transcendence but hasn’t found it. (qtd in Hartley 174) While Lukacs hinted at the possibility of overcoming the totality of ironic alienation by way of its own awareness, this picture remained unclear until he redrew it along Marxist lines.2 In History of Class Consciousness, it is in the self-consciousness of the proletariat that society is given a new “epic poet,” who, like Dante’s traveler, could “envelop everything in the unity of its own meaning.” (188) Thus, the proletariat becomes the cosmic “hero” and is “the solution to the problem that the novel was born to fail to solve.” (Hartley 175) 

By these lights, a text’s dramatic form not only represents the historical conditions of its writing, it can be the poetry, or farce, of a historical process developing, or not, toward synthesis.3 Whether its poetry or farce, Lukacs’ history contains and contextualizes literature in the totality of the proletariat’s self-consciousness or alienation. Therefore, it's only against the backdrop of a Marxist anthropology that the critic can know history and therefore interpret texts. This “dialectical unity” (ibid) is a picture of human action and history tout court, capable of dramatizing literary production itself.4 But a closer look at Lukacs’ later political philosophy shows this unity to be more unstable than his literary theory would suggest. In “Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization” he admits that dialectics alone cannot fully ground the process by which a class becomes conscious. This means that the existence of the proletariat is not sufficient, it is “always threatened by the seductions of the immediate consciousness.” This is how, for him, “the communist party” becomes “a necessary condition for revolution.” (Stahl) Within this picture, what then becomes of the dramatic form of society in which literary interpretation is supposed to work? Is the epic hero of reality really the proletariat? Or is it, as Lukacs seems to suggest, party leadership that embodies the poetry of the future?5 It’s difficult to see how literary production fits within the politics of Marxism if the dialectical unity of history requires, not the historical-material process, but some division of society between leaders and their people.6 Here, Lukacs himself seems to fall victim to “the seductions of the immediate consciousness.”  

In attempting to synthesize the literary object with the reading subject in a totalized dramatic history, Lukacs can’t help but leave a remainder—the need to kickstart that drama. This, of course goes against Engel’s explanation to Bloch, that material “history runs its course like a natural process,” (Engels) a process which is, in part, both formative of and formed by the mental attitudes expressed in literature. But Lukacs’ incomplete project is helpful in clarifying the historical materialist’s task: if some poetry of history justifies Marxist criticism, then an account of how ideology is avoided must ground its method. This challenge is what Fredric Jameson calls “the most dramatic battleground of the confrontation between Hegelian and structural Marxism.”7 (Jameson 9) His solution is to suggest re-reading Lukacs, converting the idea of historical totality into a “strategy of containment,” a mere “imperative to totalize.” (Jameson 53) This reduces Lukacs’s grand vision of actual historical drama to a method, a way of comparing a theoretical totality to a hypothetical totality—like a novel—so the “ideological can be unmasked and made visible.” (ibid) Motivating this overhaul is the upshot of what Daniel Hartley calls Jameson’s “ingenious twist:” it allows the interpreter to think primarily of a text’s “historical conditions” without having to theorize the drama of history itself. (Hartley 175) Thus, Jameson’s argument for the political unconscious develops “as a certain kind of attention…” on the part of “the reading mind “toward one particular order of textual phenomena.”8 (Jameson 71) Instead of making his knowledge of the text a function of what some totality makes possible, Jameson works from a theory of social desires, allowing narratives to have “the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions.” (ibid) Texts are never capable of achieving totality as such; contradictions are always present. 

However, in making critical knowledge a matter of simply “noticing” contexts and relationships, critics have wondered how political Jamesonian interpretation can be. What is particularly Marxist about his method? While he does assert that “only Marxism offers a…coherent….and compelling resolution to the problem of historicism,” it's not clear how Marxism is directly functional in his process. (Jameson 19) As Terry Eagleton points out, in making Marxism a precondition for, but not operational in reading, Jameson cuts a “dialectical figure” which “both compensates for and adumbrates pleasures historically postponed, goals as yet politically unrealizable…”9 (Eagleton 16) In stopping short of Lukacs’s vision of criticism as part of a Marxist totality, Jameson excludes himself from revolutionary activity.10 As he says, “the true dialectician…will always wish patiently for the stirrings of historical revolution even within defeat” (Jameson 23, 1998), and elsewhere, speaking of political failures, that one’s “point of view must be an elevated and a distant, even a glacial one, in order for these all too human categories of success and failure to become indifferent in their own opposition.” (Jameson 2010, 554) To this, Hartley asks, “indifferent to whom?” Jameson’s patience “could even be read as an” apathy toward “the repressed.” (Hartley 203) By reducing Lukacs’ dramatic history to a logical imperative, Jameson solves the problem of grounding the progressive reading subject. But he does so at the expense of a progressive history in which that reader can participate as a critic. Jameson’s dialectical method retains Engels’ assertion that ‘economic factors are decisive but not the only factor,’ yet, by converting historical totality into a containment strategy, he risks evacuating materialist criticism of its revolutionary force. In Jameson, while the farces of the past have never been clearer, the poetry of the future is more distant than it was, even for Marx.  

Jameson then represents a kind of terminus in the trajectory of the historical materialists covered so far, each of whom struggle to hold three commitments together: (a) a vision of history as material and contingent, unfolding toward some utopian possibility; (b) a conception of literature as both contained within and representative of that historical drama; and (c) a theory of interpretation that aligns with, rather than resists, that drama’s poetic structure. What we see in the case of Marx is a commitment to (a) and (b) at the expense of knowing (c); in the case of Lukacs (a) and (c) are preserved at the expense of (b); and Jameson so qualifies (a) and (c) for the sake of (b) that actual Marxist resistance is declawed. Therefore, the struggle to maintain all three reveals the challenge for historical materialist reading: situating the critic within the same history as the text. It is perhaps due to these opposed and limited accounts that, as theory returned to history in the early 1980s, (a) (b) and (c) were reimagined in ways that deviated from their Marxist genetics.  

New Historicism is a prime example. It represents a break with, or rather a suffusion of (a), (b), and (c), leading to a broader, generalized historicity. However, just as it had been for historical materialism, the epistemological position of the reader remained a motivating factor in New Historicism’s development. Where Marxist versions sought ways to overcome subjective-objective opposition, New Historicism emerged as a desire to subjectify the objective and so to existentialize political reading. Stephen Greenblatt explained this project as eroding “the firm ground of both criticism and literature,” challenging “a secure distinction between artistic production and other kinds of social production.” (qtd in Brannigan 61) The result was a “poetics of culture,” requiring “thick description,” a mode of writing the “terrifying complexity” of a given text’s context in all its analogical and interpenetrated themes. (Geertz 53-54) Central to this was an understanding of essences and identities as fundamentally facile and performative, “the category of the real merg[ing] with that of the fictive.” (Greenblatt 31) As H. Aram Veeser explained, there is “no discourse, imaginative or archival” that “gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature.” (Veeser xi)  

Thus, where Marxist criticism sought to ground interpretation as a science of history, New Historicism troubled the very foundations making science possible. This placed the reader in a novel position. As Foucault, a core reference for New Historicists, explained it, “the problem is no longer one of ... lasting foundations but one of transformations.” When thinking of history we must ask, “by what criteria is one to isolate the unities with which one is dealing. What is a science? What is an oeuvre? What is a theory? What is a concept? What is a text?” (Foucault 5) Here we see the fundamental break from historical materialist totalities all together—whether real or merely formal. New Historicists leveraged radical questioning, as John Brannigan points out, to dismantle “enlightenment chronology” and the malignant politics of “temporal and historical” order. (Brannigan 204) But this radical revision of what it meant to historicize also seemed to subjectify the past, potentially reducing it to the aesthetic of individual theorists. It’s this orientation toward the subject which separates New Historicism from classical historical materialism. History is not “the production and reproduction of actual life,” (Engels) but something more immediate and affective.  

In this way, situating the reader in history motivates New Historicist theorizing, but in a postmodern mode. Where Marxists sought to synthesize subject and object, New Historicists transmuted the object into subject. For instance, Greenblatt, in his introduction to Renaissance Self-Fashioning admits that his thesis sounds “just as forced and unconvincing” as the popular, Marxist interpretation. But the answer is not “that the truth lies somewhere in between. (Greenblatt 10) Rather, the truth is radically unstable…” (ibid) Any “reductive generalization about Shakespeare… seems dubious…” His “plays offer no single timeless affirmation or denial of legitimate authority and no central unwavering authorial presence.” The only thing we can know for sure is that Shakespeare “explores the relations of power in a given culture.” However, the “intense, purposeless pleasure” Shakespeare's characters display may give us a hint at something more. Their pleasure “is only superficially a confirmation of existing values,” a deeper [political] “liberation…is glimpsed in [their] excessive aesthetic delight,” especially in characters “whose love is…deeply unsettling.” Here, Greenblatt thinks mere historical-political causation— “reductive generalization about…culture”—amounts to so much rhetorical squabbling when set against a different kind of explanation. It's only when “liberation…is glimpsed in an excessive aesthetic delight…” that a deeper truth about Shakespeare is uncovered. In this we see a truly new kind of historicity, one in which the critic experiences the past, its “unsettling love,” and so turns the object of literature into a subject. But who/what is this subject? As Greenblatt would later explain, he “began with the desire to speak with the dead.” But even when all he “could hear was [his] own voice, even then [he] did not abandon [his] desire… [for his] own voice [became] the voice of the dead.” (Greenblatt 1, 1988)  

This is how thick description recasts historical analysis as an encounter with the self, and not the development of propositions which are either true or not. As Walter Benn Michaels points out, Greenblatt is not “interested in the kind of continuity offered by the claim that events in the past have caused conditions in the present.” (Michaels 138) After all, such would be, as Greenblatt argues, “just as forced and unconvincing” as any other. Rather, New Materialism wants to speak with the dead, to become the dead, and in so relativizing the past to the questions and intuitions of the reader, reimagine the past as the present. This is how New Historicism emerges, as historical materialism did, from the tension of subject and object, but develops entirely new answers. But with them, new liabilities. As Clifford Geertz,” the New Historicist who coined the phrase “thick description,” argues in Available Light, “‘a practical politics of cultural conciliation’” is needed for progressive change—exactly what New Historicism calls for. But how any “‘unity of intent’” required for “a common strategy and direction” emerges from New Historicism’s personal and affective sense of the past is hard to see. (Geertz 256-57) When do the wheels of the critical sublime hit the political road? If the historical materialist must choose between “the path of the object” and “the path of the subject,” New Historicism develops as an interpermeation of both, leaving us with an aesthetic of the political, a feeling about its importance, but no objective history by which or in which change happens, nor a historical dialectic by which, in contrast, a classical Marxist can work for utopia.  

This radical alteration of the subject position has led to alternate and reactive assertions of subjectivity within academe, especially regarding textual form. An important contemporary example is the New Formalism. It appears in the early aughts as a ressourcement of New Criticism—perhaps most famously in MLQ’s 2000 issue titled Reading for Form. As Marjorie Levinson explains, “better described as a movement than a theory or method,” New Formalism seeks to restore “to today’s…historical reading [a] focus on form.” (Levinson 558) It is their focus on texts themselves that make New Formalists resistant to the dissolving subjectivity of New Historicism. But friendly critics like Fredric Bogel have issued a caution: “if historicist arguments too often minimize or dilute formalist assumptions and achievements, contemporary formalism must not replay that bias in another key.” (qtd in Spell) Taking these warnings seriously, many New Formalists have worked to synthesize their readings with New Historicist claims, at least signaling their acknowledgement of the importance of history and politics. In so doing, new attempts at reconciling the reading subject to history have emerged.  

Recently, Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network has offered solutions. Where Greenblatt works to understand the forms of text as history, Levine works the other way, imagining history as fundamentally formal. Authorizing this move is a “broad definition” of form recast as “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference.” (Levine 3, 2015) This retranslates politics and social activity into “activities of ordering, patterning, and shaping…enforcing boundaries, temporal patterns, and hierarchies on experience.” She insists: “there is no politics without form;” (ibid) politics are just as “conceptual” and “abstract” (Levine 632, 2006) as sonnets and dialogue. This is why Levine calls for an expansion of formal reading practices to include “cultural entities” in texts, what she reimagines as “sites where many conflicting ways of imposing order jostle one another, overlap, and collide” (634). Indeed, “wholeness” itself becomes “the very possibility of” historical and textual “conceptualization.” (Levine 28, 2015) In this way, texts as forms emerge as both contained within and containing history broadly construed, each affording a multiplicity of effects in many directions at once—effects on the reading subject, a social period, physical entities—schools, armies, sewing circles, social clubs—and the text itself in its various modes of organization.  

By conceiving of history as form, or, perhaps, a kind of form of forms, Levine resources both the Marxist and New Historicist traditions. Citing Jameson, that “‘historical and ideological subtext…is not immediately present as such…’ but ‘rather must itself always be (re)constructed after the fact,’” she is committed to the aesthetic of the “social agon” from which “systems of social relations” emerge. (Levine 625, 2006) Here, she echoes Marx’s commitment to the dramatic form of history as that which conceptualizes social relations. But, for Levine, while the past may have a poetry, it's neither dialectical nor material and therefore, history itself is not progressive. Rather, her use of Foucauldian power and a New Historicist suspicion of hegemony leads her in a looser, politically voluntarist direction. That said, to the extent forms afford their effects, history is a matter of causes and powers overlapping and colliding.11 Her view of history, therefore, is certainly materialist, but owes more to Nietzsche than to Marx, committed to tracing the path of history, but a deer path. There is no utopia at its end.  

This has downstream effects on the politics of her criticism. In her reading of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days, for instance, she notices a tonal shift halfway through the novel in which the repetitive cycle of physical-confrontation-met-with-resolute- resistance gives way to a more sensitive bildungsroman, what she tracks as a masculine-feminine split in the novel. She argues that this social form— gender binary— competes with the aesthetic/generic form—adventure and bildungsroman—to account for the whole of the narrative, a tension between the two creating the novel’s dramatic thrust. Part of what she is doing here is giving an alternative to the historical materialist idea that aesthetic form is epiphenomenal and wants to show that literary forms are more than “responses to social realities.” They are “forms encountering other forms.” (Levine 14, 2015) This is a push against the idea that “…social forms are the grounds or causes of literary forms…” Instead, she thinks we should ask “what does each form afford, and what happens when forms meet?” (ibid) But it's hard to see the political value in this adjustment. Her commitment to the idea of forms—even doubling down on a Platonic version of them—complicates her status as a materialist, but also as a progressive.12  

If all that motivates our political reading is the malignancy of certain affordances without a means by which to explain that malignancy—its literary effects included—it's hard to see what grounds a political reading to begin with. Without something like a Marxist base to history, what accounts for oppression in the superstructure? Hence, by so empowering the reading subject’s noticing—even making their perception objective to the extent it is epistemologically formal—history as an explanation of mental attitudes in literature is adumbrated, even erased. Perhaps this is due to her making forms a matter of epistemology? How can she avoid the charge of idealism if form really is the precondition of thought in principle. Not that her insistence on it doesn’t make sense. If she were to relax this commitment, the universal claim she wants forms to have on human knowledge would relax too. This could result in a corrosive relativism in which the interpreter’s formal analysis would, at best, be personal. The forms of hegemony, for instance, in texts would be little more than personal projections, and therefore have no political urgency. Interestingly, we see in Levine’s historicity a remix of the tension found in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Marx’s insistence on the drama of an aesthetic history—both as produced by history and descriptive of it—leaves him in an uneasy position with respect to the possibility of recognizing the “poetry of the future.” Likewise, Levine, though swapping aesthetics for form, implicates the reading subject in an equally difficult position: how are forms both material, actually political, and knowledge giving if, as she insists, they are the very condition of thinking about the past?  

Like the other historicist frameworks explored in this essay, Levine’s New Formalism reveals how the tension between subject and object remains central to the project Engels identified: how the mental attitudes in literature reflect, and emerge from, material history. Recall that a strong, Lukacsian view of human action, while successfully setting literature within a clear drama of history, seems to over-determine politics as a formal fact of the text, exactly what Jameson tries to convert into an antiseptic method, but that which, in turn, ends up evacuating his Marxism of political force. And by the same token, in making history immanent to the reading subject for political ends, New Historicism seems to blur the distinction between subject and object, resulting in a relativizing of the text, that which New Formalists attempt to foreground by objectifying conceptualization itself in the idea of forms. By making the “reflections...in the brains” of individuals a mode of social reproduction, Engels’ explanation to Bloch was perhaps a more provocative insight then he could have known, at least for literary studies, inciting deeper meditation on the project of historical materialism itself and its relation to the history from which it emerges—to varying and unequal degrees of success.  

As E.H. Carr noted, knowledge of history can neither be “a hard core of facts” surrounded “by a pulp of disreputable interpretation” nor a “‘hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disreputable facts…’ It must be a dialectic between the two.” (qtd in Hamilton 17) However, as Marx makes clear, synthesis is not just a matter of knowledge but of social practice, which makes solving the problem feel something like anxiously waiting on the eschaton. The discomfort of this is made more vivid for those of us who see within criticism an ethical responsibility. If the critic wants, but can’t have, the poetry of the future, the question of how to locate their marooned position on the ideological map is an urgent one. Moreover, if attempts to do so result in the kind of repetition I’ve located here, there’s always the danger that historical materialism as a discipline has fallen under Marx’s reproach and repeated history as farce. It's outside the scope of this essay to investigate if this has happened or not. Perhaps the question is best left by considering what Terry Eagleton has called the “Marxist sublime.” Having located the contradiction of capitalism, historical materialism may, in a negative sense, function to “project its opposite—a contrasting bodily rather than ideological fulfillment of human needs.” (92) Yes, maybe our criticism, to the extent it successfully locates history’s inconsistencies, can itself begin to transfigure the poetry of the future as a form of what capitalism is not. But then again, this suggests another, uneasy question: is the hope for some form of not-capitalism enough to sustain our critique?  

Works Cited 

Bogel, Fredric V. New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave  

Macmillan, 2013. 

Brannigan, John. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. Transitions. New York: St.  

Martin’s Press, 1998. 

Eagleton, Terry. “Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style.” Diacritics 12, no. No. 3 (Autumn  

1982): 14–22. 

Engels, Fredrick. “The Materialist Conception of History: Engels to J. Bloch,” September 21,  

1890. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21b.htm. 

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Westminster: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012. 

Geertz, Clifford. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics.  

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. 

———. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Repr. New York, NY: Basic Books,  

2009. 

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare: With a New  

Preface. Reprint. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 

———. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England.  

The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 4. Berkeley: University of California Press,

1988. 

Hamilton, Paul. Historicism. 2nd ed. The New Critical Idiom. London; New York: Routledge,  

2003. 

Hartley, Daniel. The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics. Chicago, Ill: Haymarket  

Books, 2017. 

Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method. London; New York: Verso, 1998. 

———. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell  

University Press, 2015. 

———. Valences of the Dialectic. Paperback ed., 1. publ. London: Verso, 2010. 

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton Oxford: Princeton  

University Press, 2017. 

———. “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies.” Victorian Studies  

48, no. 4 (Summer 2006). 

Levinson, Marjorie. “What Is New Formalism.” PMLA 122, no. 2 (March 2007). 

Lukacs, Georg. “The Theory of The Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on The Forms of  

Great Epic Literature.” In Theory of The Novel: A Historical Approach, edited by Michael McKeon. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 

———. “Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization.” In History and Class  

Consciousness, 294–342. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1971. 

Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire.” In Marxist Literary Theory, edited by Terry Eagleton  

and Milne Drew. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. 

Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton,

N.J:  Princeton University, 2004. 

Spell, William. “The New Aesthetics: New Formalist Literary Theory.” Life and Literature,  

2001. 

Stahl, Titus. “Georg [György] Lukács.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by  

Edward Zalta and Uri Nodelman, n.d. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/lukacs/>. 

Veeser, H. Aram. The New Historicism. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013.