During the spring break in my second year of university, I almost gave my parents a heart attack.
I was combing through my latest reading assignment for one of my English classes at Columbia University. The course in question, a seminar on American Modernism, featured some of the literary masterpieces — The Sun Also Rises, As I Lay Dying, The House of Mirth — that had gotten me excited to study English in the first place. The course also featured extensive supplementary readings from none other than Karl Marx.
My parents were rightfully horrified. My mom and dad fled the Soviet Union in 1993. After living under communist oppression for nearly 30 years, they made the difficult decision to abandon a Russia left in shambles to give their kids a better future in the West. I was the first person in my family to enjoy the privilege of American citizenship, and I grew up believing vehemently in the tenets of classical liberalism: individual liberty, private property rights, free market economies. These were the principles that guided my intellectual curiosity throughout my grade school years, and these were the ideas that I carried with me as I prepared to study literature.
Imagine my disappointment, then, when nearly every English syllabus featured readings from Karl Marx — the man who was the ideologue responsible for the prolonged sufferings of my family.
In my early university days, I approached these readings with an open mind. I was curious to learn all about the ideology that had created one of the most evil countries in the world, and I was prepared to tackle it from its roots. But the more that Karl Marx and his acolytes cropped up on my syllabi, the more I couldn’t help but notice that something was deeply wrong. It wasn’t just one professor who had assigned us the German intellectual — it was nearly all of them. And what was Marx doing on English literature syllabi in the first place?
The more I attempted to answer that question, the more unsettled I became: it turned out that the proliferation of Marxist theory in the academy was no accident.
During the McCarthy era, when Marxist thinkers were barred from holding positions of power in the government, they found themselves welcomed with open arms by the academy, which soon underwent a radical ideological shift. As these Marxist professors flooded the academies, their ideology spread, and scores of English professors — creative types who tend to lean left politically anyway — began to steer literary theory in the direction of hazy Marxist thought. It was only a matter of time before radical ideology became dogma in English departments across the country.
In the wake of World War II, previously established truths were left either in complete shambles or in danger of subversion. It was this eradication of objective truth that opened up the academy to more progressive ideologies espoused by the members of the New Left in the 1960s. One particular sub-current of the New Left became particularly dominant in American academia: the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. When one of its leading figures Herbert Marcuse, joined the faculty at Columbia University, he brought his theory of “repressive tolerance” to the literary sphere, arguing that traditional tolerance in society perpetuates repressive ideologies, and that true liberation can occur only when society becomes intolerant of hierarchies based on race and class. As Marcuse’s ideas found fertile ground in the academy, English professors increasingly began to question the notion that literature could be viewed outside of a socio-political context. This trend, which began with the Frankfurt School, was then only reinforced by the proliferation of other Marxist and postmodernist theories.
Today, in English departments across the world, Marxist theory is not merely a peripheral influence on the study of literature but the dominant framework that guides literary interpretation. As students of English literature digest Karl Marx for breakfast, they become indoctrinated into a painfully one-sided system of analysing literature, erroneously believing that Mansfield Park is a novel about race and Howards End is a novel about class consciousness. While these novels might indeed appeal to certain aspects of race and class, this narrow-minded approach to analysing literature causes students to miss the point of these monumental texts as a whole: to comment on more universal facets of the human experience.
I don’t believe that the works of Karl Marx should be ritually expunged from the academy. In fact, we should read Marx to understand the origins of so much radical ideology in the Western world. But we should certainly stop treating Marx as gospel and instead strive to separate his teachings from the literary academy. In swapping out truth, beauty and morality for political ideology, we do a disservice not only to literature but to ourselves.
Original photo by Maximilian Scheffler.