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Questionnaire
- Minnesota Review
- Duke University Press
- Number 8, Spring 1977 (New Series)
- p. 175
- Article
- Additional Information
QUESTIONNAIRE 175 QUESTIONNAIRE When the New Series of The Minnesota Review started in the Fall of 1973, my idea was to put two things together in the hopes of developing a third. The first of these was the best of what David Peck has recently called "the new Marxist criticism," a mode of criticism which, since the late 60's, has proliferated enormously in the West in almost every academic discipline. The second was the best writing I could find. The poets and writers of fiction seemed not to have heard of Marx. Or, if they had, they had dismissed him and his ideas as outmoded and slightly jejune. Given the traditional antipathy between writers and the academy, at least in this country, it was not surprising to find writers disinterested in what probably looks like the critics' latest toy. At any rate, it was my hope (and perhaps it was only an idealistic hope) to see if an informed Marxist criticism, published beside the best writing I could find, might eventually develop modes of consciousness in writing today that would do, creatively, what the new Marxist criticism had begun to do critically. It was my thought, too, of course, that once fully aroused, the writers could do the job the critics had started much better, more vividly, to a wider audience, etc. Whatever objections can be raised to such an endeavor, and happily I did not know them all when I started, a number of readers and contributors have begun raising kinds of questions that probably should have been raised at the outset. "What is a Marxist poem?", asked one frustrated poet. Another less frustrated one said, "Should I go back and put noble workers and capitalist bosses into my poems?" "I'm not from the working class," said a writer of fiction; "can I write as a Marxist?" The magazine's closest readers have been quick to point out what one of them calls "the gap between the humming theoretical machinery of the usual reviews and the actual poetry." All of this suggests, among other things, that there is either uncertainty or divisional least among artists-over the relation between Marxism and the arts. Though there have been a number of excellent investigations of this question in the past, it is not a question with a fixed or unalterable answer. It seems to me that the time has come to air the matter again. What do you feel the relationship between Marxism and art is, or ought to be? In answering the question, you might touch on any one of a number of issues. What are the strengths and/or weaknesses of our bourgeois cultural heritage? Whom should one be writing for? What is working class culture and should it, or something developed from it, become the culture of the future? To what extent does the writer's class determine the value of his or her work? These (and others you might choose) are all ways of getting at the general question-to rephrase it-What is Marxism 's primary value to the artist today? Answers of any length are welcome (though it might be helpful if you kept your response to two typed pages). We shall publish a long selection of answers in the next issue. Press deadline is August 15, 1977. ...