ABSTRACT
The great emphasis placed by Marxist theorists and their critics on economic and political issues obfuscated the ‘global’ nature of Marxism. As we have seen, Gramsci sought to restore the original flexibility of Marx’s theory and reformulate its ‘global’ claims. He elaborated a gnosiological, historiographic and political theory. At the forefront of his political theory are the problems of the masses, intellectuals and hegemony, and those of historicism and humanism in his historiography and gnosiology. Gramsci also placed a great emphasis on the analysis of cultural phenomena. The reason is simple. Socialism meant to him above all a reorganization of culture. A great portion of his writings deals with the problems of art, theater, literature, literary criticism, poetry, and language. He certainly did not analyze systematically all these cultural phenomena, nor did he elaborate a Marxist theory of aesthetics, art, literature and language. He did, however, as Anglani and Petronio have noted, delineate the fundamental framework of a Marxist analysis and theory of literary criticism, art and language.1 Gramsci analyzed all these phenomena from the more general perspective of the philosophy of praxis, and the practical goal of the conquest of hegemony. His analysis of cultural phenomena is, then, political and historicist. All cultural phenomena are essentially historical phenomena, thus, instruments in the process of transformation of the world. We choose to examine Gramsci’s analysis of language and art to show the centrality of cultural politics in Gramsci’s thought. We shall attempt in this chapter to present in an organic manner the key concepts developed by Gramsci in regard to the problem of language, often neglected in Marxist literature.
