Essential Premises in Marxist Literary Scholarship

Abstract

Any method is ultimately based on a specific conception of the subject under investigation. Marxism views literary scholarship as a function of social life which is subject in terms of both its existence and its development on social necessity. This has been and continues to be the basis for referring to the Marxist method as a sociological method. This is true to a certain extent. Since the Marxist method views literature as a social phenomenon, it must be considered to be one of the sociological methods. But in point of fact, the term "sociological method" is an extremely vague designation that can lead to methodological confusion, a term that we may even need to discard altogether. In essence, there really is no such thing as a sociological method, nor can there be, since there are as many sociological methods as there are sociologies. We know that there are idealistic systems of sociology, and they certainly cannot serve as the basis for the sociological method known as Marxist sociology. We could nam...