Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective

by McKenna, Tony

• ISBN13: 9781137526601
• ISBN10: 1137526602
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-08-19
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective provides a journey through some of the most salient and abiding instances of art, literature, TV series and film. The analysis ranges from more classical works such as the paintings of Van Gogh or the writing of Balzac and Brontë, right through to those on the cutting edge of contemporary culture including HBO's Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead and the music of Tupac Shakur.

The author demonstrates, with a lucid and literary style, how these works are able to weave into a fantasy fabric the fundamental forms of the historical realities in which we are enmeshed. McKenna shows how each is stamped with that historical necessity.

Author Biography

Tony Mckenna is a Hegelian-Marxist whose work has been featured by The Huffington Post, The United Nations, NewStatesman, New Internationalist, ABC Australia, In These Times, Counterpunch, New Humanist, Science and Society, Critique Journal of Socialist Theory, Monthly Review, Socialism and Democracy, Overland Literary Journal, Ceasefire and Marx and Philosophy Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Breaking Bad: Capital as Cancer
2. In Time: The First Hollywood Movie of the Occupy Wall Street Era
3. The Walking Dead: The Archetype of the Zombie in the Modern Epoch
4. Let Me In: The Figure of the Vampire as Kantian Noumenal
5. True Detective and Capitalist Development in its Twilight Phase
6. Tupac Shakur: History's Poet
7. Vincent Van Gogh
8. The Song of Achilles: How the Future Transforms the Past
9. Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna and the Nature of the Historical Novel
10. Balzac's Women and the Impossibility of Redemption in Cousin Bette
11. The Wife - A Study in Patriarchy and Veiled Oppression
12. The Vigilante in Film: The Movement from Death-Wish, to Batman, to Taxi-driver
13. A Mirror into our World: The Radical Politics of Game of Thrones
14. Harry Potter and the Modern Age
15. The Hunger Games Trilogy - Art for the Occupy Era
16. The Politics of Deduction: Why has Sherlock Holmes Proven so Durable?
17. Literary Love as Transcendental Sublime: Wuthering Heights and The Sea, The Sea
18. Brief Loves that Live Forever: the Historical Melancholy of Andreï Makine
19. John William's novel Stoner and the Dialectic of the Infinite and Finite
20. From Tragedy to Farce: The Comedy of Ricky Gervais as Capitalist Critique