ABSTRACT
Marxist literary criticism is a house with many mansions, most of them claiming a privileged access to the great central chamber of history and meaning. Only the most blinkered polemicist could nowadays attack ‘Marxist criticism’ as if it presented a uniform front or a clearly delineated target. Differences of outlook have developed to a point where debates within Marxism are often more highly charged and polarized than anything brought to bear by its downright opponents. These differences will seem a crippling liability only from the viewpoint of a hard-line determinist creed which insists on the rightness of its own reductive methodology, coupled to a single-track notion of historical necessity and change. The alternative, as New Left theorists have argued, is to examine the diversity of present-day Marxist thinking and show how its various traditions take rise from various backgrounds of political and cultural development. Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) is one such attempt to ‘situate’ the work of thinkers like Sartre, Althusser and Adorno in terms of their beleaguered position as Marxist intellectuals outside the active mainstream of any revolutionary movement.
