Toward a Capitalist Criticism

Here at the Critical Capitalist we do literary criticism from a capitalist perspective. In academia students are inundated with theories or literary criticisms from psychoanalytic to feminist to post-colonial to queer to Russian Formalist to Marxist (lots of Marxist theory) and many in between, but there rarely if ever any capitalist approach taught in literature/literary courses. Google it and you will not find it. Check wikipedia for literary criticism and you will find the ones mentioned above and many others, but you will not find capitalist or libertarian or freedom or egoist or Objectivist literary theories. This concentration on anti-capitalist theories has led to this attempt to break that mold. This article is a quick look at Capitalist Criticism.

First, what is literary criticism? Let's work with the definition offered by LitWeb,

Literary criticism [is] the evaluative or interpretive work written by professional interpreters of texts. It is "criticism" not because it is negative or corrective, but rather because those who write criticism ask hard, analytical, crucial, or "critical" questions about the works they read (LitWeb).

So, critics analyze literature by asking certain questions about the work. Sometimes the questions are informed by a particular theory such as Marxist theory. The critic using Marxist theory might ask questions about class, work, oppression, etcetera. Terry Eagleton is a well-known literary theorist. He describes Marxist criticism,

Marxist criticism is not merely a 'sociology of literature', concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. Its aim is to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and meanings. But it also means grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the product of a particular history (Eagleton, 3).

Capitalist criticism is much the same in the sense that it pays attention to form, style, and meaning. But form, style and meaning are informed not by ideas of class, exploitation or oppression as with Marxist criticism, but by ideas of freedom, ethics, individualism, justice, and reason. The term capitalist used here is not restricted to the economic theory of capitalism, rather it denotes a theory of ethics, a philosophy of a social system. This idea of a capitalist philosophy of a social system is illustrated in works of both fiction and non-fiction by many authors including Ayn Rand in her books Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, Atlas Shrugged, and others.

The capitalist critic will ask questions of the literature concerning how the writer uses the different points listed above, intentionally or otherwise. These ideas are fleshed out by way of relationships, roles, and other aspects of characterization, setting, circumstance, etcetera. The critic helps understand the writer and the work by taking a specific approach to the literature.

There is also the larger question of the work that is considered. Who wrote it and why? What were the circumstances of the authorship and what were the motivations of the author in writing it?

At each level and with each point of concern the basis of capitalist criticism is the foundational elements of capitalist philosophy: freedom, ethics, justice, individualism/egoism and reason.

The posts at this blog are just short examples of the process of capitalist criticism. More complete critiques are generally much more in depth and certainly much longer.





Works Cited

Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and literary criticism. University of California Press Berkeley 1976.

LitWeb http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/litweb05/glossary/glossary_l.htm