Soul and Form

Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts

by György Lukács

György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought. "Soul and Form" was his first book, published in 1910, and it established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Sterne, and others. By isolating the formal techniques these thinkers developed, LukAcs laid the groundwork for his later work in Marxist aesthetics, a field that introduced the historical and political implications of text.

For this centennial edition, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis add a dialogue entitled "On Poverty of Spirit," which LukAcs wrote at the time of "Soul and Form," and an introduction by Judith Butler, which compares LukAcs's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the LukAcsian system within his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic form, which communicates both individuality and a shared human condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form, the history that form implies, and the historicity that form embodies. Taken together, they showcase the breakdown, in modern times, of an objective aesthetics, and the rise of a new art born from lived experience.

Genres: Philosophy, Literature, Nonfiction, Criticism, Politics, Writing, Romanticism

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1910

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

[فرشاد · Rating 3 out of 5]

مجموعه مقالاتیست درباره اهمیت نقد ادبی و ماهیت و چیستی فرم که تمی شاعرانه و احساسی دارد و شالوده‌ایست برای کارهای بعدی نویسنده درباب زیبایی‌شناسی مارکسیستی.

[Mohammad Ranjbari · Rating 3 out of 5]

مجموعه جُستارهای ادبی، که توسط لوکاچ و در سن 25 سالگی نوشته شده است. سرچشمۀ بسیاری از اندیشه های انتقادی لوکاچ در کتاب های مشهورش را در این کتاب برای نخستین بار می توان مشاهده کرد. مزیت بزرگ این کتاب، توجه نویسنده بر بسیاری از نویسندگان و اندیشمندان فراموش شدۀ تاریخ است که با تیزبینی و جامعیت، دوباره معرفی و تحلیل می گردند. به ویژه اندیشه های انتقادی کاسنر و عشق اعتلایی سورن کیرکگور و ریچارد هافمن.
نوعی توسل و انقطاع به نظام فکری افلاطونی در این کتاب دیده می شود. نویسنده گاه به افلاطون گرایی اشاره و تایید دارد و گاه سریعاً از آن فاصله می گیرد. در بحث هایی چون: ماهیت جُستارنویسی، تاثیر ژست، تقابل و ارتباط صورت و مفهوم، بورژوا و هنر (که یکی از مهم ترین مقالات این کتاب است). متافیزیک تراژدی و ...
بلوغ فکری لوکاچ در این مرحله مورد انتقاد نیست اما کم تجربگی و ارائۀ استنباط های شخصی، گاه خواننده را به تردید دچار می کند. به عنوان مثال، در مقالۀ «انزوای جدید و شعر آن» نویسنده به طور واضح تکه پاره هایی از یادداشت های خود را در مورد شعر اشتفان گئورگه بیان کرده است و ما با یک تحلیل سبک شناختی و سیر تاریخی مواجه نیستیم.
در کل، این کتاب، برای اهل تخصصِ علاقه مند به نقد ادبی در اروپا جالب و قابل تأمل خواهد بود.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book by a profound young mind wrestling with several major intellectual currents at once through the medium of literary criticism. How can art exist in a modern world where we no longer have a naive religious cosmology that allows its symbols to be shared and understood unproblematically? By tragedy reconciling us to the one absolute still left - death - that's how. But is this tragic reconciliation achievable outside artistic forms, in empirical life? Or does the aesthetic experience merely reinforce our sense of real life loss?

[Mira میرا · Rating 4 out of 5]

نه تنها استفاده كردم كه لذت هم بردم..البته فهم مقاله هاي آخر يكم سخت تر و زمان بر بود..
با تشكر از مهرداد كه اين كتاب خوب رو بهم هديه داد..🙏🌺

[Ethan]

Essentially Lukacs' first work, a compilation of very early essays which appeared in 1908/11, with a particular focus on the function of form in literary works (a focus on mainly German literature in this volume, which of course is no surprise, but is not the only focus).

These essays are written by a very young and pre-Marxist Lukacs who is still very much under the influence of Kant, there is not so much Hegel here either. One detects some Fichte, but I ought to get more clear on that relation (I've heard many different conjectures).

The various essays present a focus on form, but it is not merely the method but the very thing being interrogated: what is "form"? What is it for a work of literature to take this or that form? Further, what is the critical essay? (on this latter question, the opening letter which serves as the volume's introduction, is very informative).

There is no basic gist to this volume, mainly due to its subject matter. There is a guiding thread but it is there to interrogate. This early Lukacs is deeply suspicious of external measures of truth and beauty when it comes to the work of art. Indeed, there is a commonality between he and later Existentialists (Sartre especially, and as noted in the afterword) which is striking, in that the measure of truth often comes down to the commitment to a form by an author, or a commitment to a fundamental gesture (as in Kierkegaard's break with Regine Olsen), the truth is often made in this creation of a totality that still bears the marks of the conditions in which it was made. This becomes the metacritical theme of a dialogue written on Sterne (which all else suspended, is a surprisingly engaging piece of fiction alone).

A good volume with a lot to offer, not only of itself, but as illuminating to Lukacs' aesthetic development.

[Filip Wijnings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nooit gedacht dat ik zo’n complexe relatie zou ontwikkelen met een 25-jarige Hongaar uit 1910

[Mohamad Ali sadeghi · Rating 5 out of 5]

جان و صورت کتابی است در ستایش فرم و شاید یکی از قشنگترین بخش های آن بحث عشق کیرکگور باشد به رگینه اولسن. خود لوکاچ هم بعدها این ژست کیرکگور را تقلید کرد و از معشوقه خود دست کشید. او این کتاب را هم به

[Elisa Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another neat book to read. Lukacs was so depressed and interesting.
He later committed suicide.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Craftsmanship may have been Flaubert’s ideal, but to be a craftsman could, for him, only be a sentimental idea (in Schiller’s sense of the word), only a longing for an irretrievably lost simplicity. The craftsmanship of Storm, Mörike, Keller, the ballad-writer Fontane, Klaus Groth and others was, in the same sense [Schiller's], naive. The goal of the former (the Flaubertian aesthetes) was to approach ideal perfection through superhuman effort, that of the latter (Storm, Mörike, etc.) was to achieve the consciousness of honest work well done—the consciousness that they had done everything in their power to create a perfect thing. For the former the accent was on work, for the latter on life; for the former, life was only a means of attaining the artistic ideal, for the latter perfection of work was only a symbol, only the surest and finest way of exploiting every possibility ordered to them by life; a symbol of the fact that the bourgeois ideal—consciousness of work well done—had indeed been achieved.

"This is why there was always a rather touching resignation about the way these men handed their works over for publication. No one was more clearly aware than they of the distance between something really perfect and the best that they themselves could do. But the awareness of this distance was alive in them with such immediate and regulated force that, actively, it played hardly any role at all."

[Manuel Correa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mi primera lectura de Lukács y me resulta algo que no puede dejarse pasar desapercibido dentro de la crítica literaria, aunque algunas de sus perspectivas, sin duda, están apegadas a su tiempo y este marcado discurso de hallar en lo literario algo que mueva al lector a cuestionarse su papel social.

[زهرا محمودی · Rating 4 out of 5]

جستارهای خیلی خوبی بودند، دقت و ظرافت ذهن نویسنده‌ای آن‌قدر جوان واقعا تحسین‌برانگیزه.

[Stella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essay on Novalis and ‘Transcendental homelessness’

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the selections we read in my Philosophical Lit Crit class. I was, however, a little confused by the last dialogue. I felt like Vincent won the arguement. But I think I think that because I espouse similar views on the form of formlessness.

[Shubhakiyarti · Rating 5 out of 5]

How to understand why tragedies can't make us laughing.