Word: marcuses
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Simultaneously, Marcus supplements the conventional analytical tools of the critic--close attention to the language and internal structure of texts--with methods drawn from other disciplines, particularly Marxian social theory and Freudian psychoanalysis. Marcus employs all of these methods to interpret each text he reads--whether by Engels, Freud, Dickens or Dashiell Hammett. And in each case, these different levels of analysis are neither entirely separable nor reducible one to the other. For Marcus, the tropes and ambiguities of a writer's language furnish keys to the underlying meaning of his work, to the way his vision of society...
...Because Marcus is at once sensitive to the texture of a writer's language and to his wider concerns, he excels at the traditional critic's touchstone of talent, the actual reading of a text. Marcus's ability to illuminate unseen aspects of familiar texts and to enrich their meaning is quite remarkable. In his book on Engels (1974), by contrasting Mill's and Dickens's responses to London to those of Engels, Marcus brings out at exactly what point in The Condition of the English Working Classes in 1844 Engels understands the industrial revolution in a systematic way inaccessible...
...Other Victorians (1966) Marcus examines the ananymous erotic memoir "My Secret Life." In one scene where a female agricultural worker resists the sexual advances of the local squire, Marcus reads a significant change in social consciousness, the rise of the belief that class privileges should not afford sexual dominion over the persons of social inferiors. He connects this reading to a central theme of his book, the paradox that Victorian morality had a humanizing as well as a repressive side...
...Marcus's latest book, Representations, is a collection of essays originally published in various magazines over a 15 year period, in appearance the sort of innocuous collection many successful critics produce from time to time. And in fact, a number of these pieces, such as those on Waugh, Faulkner and Hammett, have the character conventionally associated with such volumes--that of being well-written, perceptive and clever, but without a coherent purpose. The book as a whole, however, despite Marcus's protests to the contrary, reads like "an ideal project for literary studies," an embodiment of the benefits...
...number of essays illustrate the power of Marcus's methodology. In "Freud and Dora," Marcus uses literary techniques to probe psychoanalytical problems in one of Freud's case histories, elucidating his ambivalencies toward his patient and his as yet imperfect understanding of the transference relationship from the internal inconsistencies and shifts in tone of the writing. And in "Literature and Social Theory," Marcus draws out the connection between a certain style of narration and the presence of a functionalist, organicist social theory in George Eliot's fiction. By making this connection, Marcus was able to uncover the roots of both...