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Essays and Reviews by Barbara Foley
I'm always on the lookout for excellent Marxist literary and cultural criticism. Here is one place to start -- the essays and review of Barbara Foley. Recommended for tenure at Northwestern University but fired by the Provost for protesting an appearance by the fascist Alolfo Calero, the Nicaraguan 'contra' leader and former hit-man for pro-US fascist dictator Anastasio Somoza, she now teaches at Rutgers University, Newark Campus. She is also the leading spirit behind the Radical Caucus in the Modern Language Association. I hope to meet her some day -- I can't afford to travel to the MLA myself.
Here are links to those works of hers I've been able to find or scan.
Interview
with Barbara Foley by Leo Parascondola, in Workplace, 3.2 (December, 2000),
journal of the Graduate Student Caucus of the MLA. Foley talks about academic activism,
Marxism, and the ever-constant goal -- to help to bring into existence a system built
around the creation of fully realized human beings.
The Continuing Relevance of
Proletarian Literature in a Time of "Endless War", written March 2003.
Review of Phyllis Frus, The Politics and Poetics of
Journalistic Narrative: The Timely and the Timeless. From Modern Fiction
Studies 41.2 (1995) 344-346.
Questions
on Barbara Fields' and Ted Allen's Historical and Theoretical Analyses of Racism, from
Ron Strickland's On-Line
Marxist Theory course at Illinois State U., Spring 2000.
" From
Wall Street To Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's Bartleby". from American
Literature 72.1 (2000) 87-116. Excellent Marxist historical analysis of the classic
story.
"Art or Propaganda?" Chapter 4 of
Foley's book Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction,
1929-1941. Duke Univ. Press, 1993. This is the best case I have seen for the political
function of literature, and refutes all the formalist elitists with good critical
arguments and historical evidence. Scanned from her book -- I hope she doesn't mind!
"The Politics of Deconstruction."
From Genre 17 (Spring-Summer, 1984), a special issue on Deconstruction At Yale.
Maybe the best Marxist dissection of the reactionary politics of Derrida, Spivak, and the
deconstructionist critiques who pose as "leftists."
"Marxism in the Poststructuralist Moment:
Some Notes on the Problem of Revising Marx." From Cultural Critique
(Spring 1990). Sharp, well-reasoned critique of attempts to "revise" Marxism to
gut it of sharp class, revolutionary analysis, under the influence of anti-communism,
especially "anti-Stalinism."
"From
New Criticism to Deconstruction: The Example of Charles Feidelson's Symbolism in
Americn Literature." Here Foley shows the very close similarities between New
Criticism and Deconstruction. The literary "right" claims to support the former
and denounces the latter as "P.C.", and so tries to associate it with Marxism.
Foley's incisive Marxist analysis shows how similar these phony idealist philosophies are
to one another, and exposes their relationship with bourgeois ideology.
"Jean Toomer's Washington and the
Politics of Class: From 'Blue Veins' to Seventh-Street Rebels".
"'In the land of cotton'":
economics and violence in Jean Toomer's Cane", originally published in African
American Review, Summer 1998 v32 n2 p181.
"Interview with Barbara Foley",
by Ron Strickland, from Mediations, journal of the Marxist Literary Group of
the MLA, Summer 1998. Foley's incisive comments on the opportunities and obligations of
left academics today.
Introduction to Myra Page, Moscow Yankee.
Long out of print, Page's proletarian novel shows the great advances made for workers in
the USSR by the 1930s. Whatever its weaknesses, the novel shows that a better future is
possible with working people in control. Foley's introduction deftly analyses the
successes and failures of the novel, showing how they reflected the strengths and
weaknesses of socialism in the USSR itself.
"Subversion and Oppositionality in the
Academy", originally in College Literature, (June/October 1990). A great
exposé of the reactionary nature of Postmodernist criticism.
"Making It" - Review of Lawrence
S. Schwartz, Creating Faulkner's Reputation. Originally published in Novel,
Winter 1990. Critical, but overall positive review of a book showing Faulkner was
"made" into a "great writer" by Cold-War critics looking for an
anti-communist literary star.
Review of Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of
Time. Originally published in Modern Philology (February 1997). Critical
but appreciative review of an important Marxist work.
Review of Cary Nelson, ed., Will Teach
for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis. Cultural Politics ser. 12. Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Expose of pseudo-left capitulation to cutbacks in
funds for higher education.
"Class" -- an essay critiquing the
emasculation of this crucial analytical concept in "neo-Marxist" theory, and its
omission and bastardization in Postmodern theory.
"Renarrating the Thirties in the Forties and
Fifties", on anti-communism in the "liberal" Cold War literary history
after WWII.. It was the liberal critics, not the neocon 'New Critics', who fought the Cold
War by demonizing communism and the communist movement, and mocking and marginalizing the
important, excellent proletarian and left engagé literature of the '30s.
"Proletarianism Revisited", a
review of three books that, while beginning a re-evaluation and appreciation of the
committed left literature of the '30s, still continue to share the Cold War anti-communist
myths of "the Communist Party's dictatorship over literature" and which share,
in important ways, the anti-communist theoretical commitments of postmodernism.
"Ralph Ellison as Proletarian
Journalist". Foley's primary-source research has shown that Ralph Ellison agreed
with the Communist Party's line and portrayed it positively even in the first draft of
what later became Invisible Man. Ellison fully agreed with the Party's position of
making the effort to save the USSR by winning the war primary. She also points out that
the CP never "abandoned" the struggle against racism, as anti-communists
generally, and Ellison specifically, charged -- a position that has become part of
"common knowledge." Rather, the CP kept up the struggle against racism during
the war to an extent not generally recognized. Ellison's attack on the communist movement
in Invisible Man thus appears far more dishonest and opportunist.
"The Rhetoric of Anti-Communism
in Invisible Man. Long a sympathizer of the Communist Party (see previous
article), Ellison took a pro-Communist first draft of Invisible Man and made
it into a Cold War hatchet job, and was amply rewarded by the American cultural elite.
Here Foley analyses the narrative technique Ellison used to demonize the Communists.
"What's At Stake in the Culture Wars"
- a review of books by Peter Shaw, Gerald Graff, and John Guillory. An incisive
analysis of the politics beneath the froth of the so-called "culture wars" in
academia.
"Roads Taken and Not
Taken: Post-Marxism, Antiracism, and Anticommunism," (from Cultural Logic,
issue no: 2). Here Foley examines and exposes anti-communism in contemporary scholarship.
"A Response
to the UQ Symposium," from Workplace (Graduate Student Caucus, MLA) I,2.
Solid class analysis of the crisis of the university, and exposé of higher education's
role in legitimating capitalist inequality.
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Back to Sam Foote's Page of Important and Hard-to-Find Political and Cultural Texts
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