Writer and Critic: and other Essays

by György Lukács, A. Kahn (Translator)

Hardcover. No DJ. Text contains very minor pencil underlining/marking. Covers show very minor shelf wear. Binding is tight, hinges strong.

Genres: Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Theory, Nonfiction, Literature

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian and critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.

His literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.

Reviews

[Estep Nagy · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are 2 essays in this collection that I come back to over and over: "Narrate and Describe" and "The Intellectual Physiognomy." Both -- and especially the second -- were for me essential in trying to understand the aliveness of characters, which I think is pretty much the ballgame.

[Ryanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lukács gets it wrong about modernism but gets lots of other things crucially and impressively right. Genius foresight & certainly a prereq for reading Jameson (whose writings are illuminated as glaringly indebted to Lukács having now read this)

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far the most useful of Lukacs' literary theory to me, especially with a dearth of technical advice on setting, the writing of characters, and the way to integrate historical significance into a fictional plot line. The first two essays, "Art and Objective Truth" and "Marx and Engels on Aesthetics" provide good philosophical commentary on artistic objectivism from a Marxist perspective as well as the use of a dialectical method in producing literature. The seventh essay, "The Writer and Critic," is an interesting critique of the division of labour under capitalist society and how it alienates the writer and critic from each other and devalues and deforms the productive nature of both's labour. The fifth essay, "Narrate or Describe," expands on Lukacs' grievances with Zola and Flaubert in comparison to the earlier realists like Balzac, in the social content of the differing methods of realist narration and the later method of description. Unfortunately, this essay is abridged and cuts out further commentary on contemporary Soviet literature.