Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 8 - Literature and the State

  • Edited by Colleen Lye, University of California, Berkeley, Christopher Nealon
  • Book:
    After Marx
    Published online:
    12 March 2022
    Print publication:
    17 March 2022, pp 131-142

  • Summary

    After locating two distinct Marxist aesthetic traditions – Lenin's claim that a “party literature” can be free or autonomous because it doesn’t have to answer to capitalist constraints, and another less optimistic tradition that argues that as art is a commodity, it is all about capitalist constraints – this chapter argues for a third one that presumes there is much to gain by putting Marxist and anarchist theories of literature closer together than they often are. The chapter first recounts how the Bolsheviks turned a resistant literature into a state literature after the Russian revolution. It then traces this understanding through the Cold War, pointing out how it also shaped the relationship that the US state has to literature. The conclusion argues for a Marxist aesthetic that is not based on the Soviet example, but one based instead on revolutionary moments such as Russian Revolution or the Paris Commune or the anticolonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s.