Guide to Week 4: Tuesday

        In the web page hyperlinked to this week's reading in Tyson, I have abstracted key terms and theoretical principles that identify various authors who helped create this critical theory and its interpretive methods.  After you have read Tyson, review the terms and principles, and make sure you understand them.  The first portion of our discussion will be a review of Tyson, and then we will look at some broader issues like those below.

        If you are unfamiliar with Karl Marx's life and work, you should consult this biographical note, produced by the Marxists Internet Archive, which traces his life and work in a short summary.  As in the case of the Freud Museum site (in the Psychoanalytic class page), this site actively recruits visitors to pursue Marxist political projects in a wide variety of forms, and for this reason it must be considered a lobbying organization with ideological and pecuniary interests in representing Marx's work, rather than a scholarly site.  Again, consider this aspect of the site as evidence of the powerful long-term effects of Marxist theory and critical methods which live on long after their founder's death.  Think about the forces which cause contemporaries to turn to Marxist thinking long after the end of successful Marxist nation-states.  Does consumerism still blind people to their own best interests?  Do people still make terrible choices while thinking they're pursuing "the American Dream"?  Does the commodification of people and ideas ever produce situations in which their "sale" becomes revolting but unstoppable?  These circumstances enable Marxist theory and interpretive methods to generate insights unavailable to classical formal criticism, or to psychoanalytic criticism.  If you have not already done so, click here for a list of terms of art and processes necessary to applications of Marxist interpretive methods.

Useful Web Pages

Class in America: Nick's and Tom's relative economic status and what Fitzgerald is trying to tell us about the sheer excess of Tom's lifestyle

Titles Communicate Theory: Can You Tell Which Theories These Articles Use?