Georg Lukács: ‘Critical Realism and Socialist Realism’

This article examines Georg Lukács’ The Historical Novel (1937–8) and four works on the novel written by Mikhail Bakhtin between 1936 and 1941 in relation to the Great Terror and Soviet socialist realism. It argues that, to a large extent, Lukács’ and Bakhtin’s theories of the novel of the 1930s stemmed from a moral urgency felt and shared by the authors to salvage the novel – a category that has significant implications for history for both theorists – from the damages wrought by socialist realism. Focusing on the ways in which Bakhtin and Lukács encode their dissent into legitimate narratives, the article draws attention to the art of cunning – dissimulation, equivocation, doublespeak and coding – as a means of disrupting tyrannical discourse, registering difference and surviving. Both Lukács and Bakhtin held ambiguous views on socialist realism and both of them capitalized on the ambivalence inherent in official Soviet discourse.

History, freedom, politics. The idea of the ancient Greek in Georg Lukács and Hannah Arendt

Társadalomkutatás ◽

10.1556/tarskut.27.2009.1.2 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 27 (1) ◽

pp. 19-25

Author(s):

Gábor Budai

Keyword(s):

Hannah Arendt ◽

Ancient Greek ◽

Georg Lukacs ◽

Georg Lukács. Kultur, Kunst und politisches Engagement

10.1007/978-3-658-11458-9 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Lothar Peter

Keyword(s):

Georg Lukacs ◽

L'évolution de la pensée de Georg Lukács

L Homme et la société ◽

10.3406/homso.1971.1405 ◽

1971 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 13-36 ◽

Author(s):

Nicolas Tertulian

Keyword(s):

Georg Lukacs ◽

Entretien avec Georg Lukács. Critique de la bureaucratie socialiste, questions de méthode

L Homme et la société ◽

10.3406/homso.1971.1404 ◽

1971 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 3-12

Author(s):

Györg Lukács ◽

Yvon Bourdet

Keyword(s):

Georg Lukacs ◽

Saints and Miracles: The End of the Affair

10.1093/oso/9780198828570.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Allan Hepburn

Keyword(s):

The Novel ◽

Graham Greene ◽

Georg Lukacs ◽

Dorothy Sayers ◽

Theory Of The Novel ◽

The Mind ◽

Miracles rarely appear in novels, yet Graham Greene includes several of them in The End of the Affair. Sarah Miles heals a boy suffering from appendicitis and a man with a disfigured cheek. Like a saint, she seems to heal or revive through her compassionate touch, as when she raises her lover, who may or may not have died in a bomb blast, by touching his hand. This chapter locates Sarah’s interventions amidst debates about miracles, beginning with David Hume’s sceptical rejection of inexplicable phenomena, through such mid-century books as C. S. Lewis’s Miracles and Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker. The inherent godlessness of novels, as Georg Lukacs puts the matter in Theory of the Novel, would seem to ban mystical content altogether from novelistic discourse. Yet this chapter argues for the revaluation of mystical content—the ordeals of the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, for example—within the generic precincts of the novel.

„Der Weg zum Werk“: Werkkonzepte zwischen Kunst, Essayistik und Wissenschaft bei Georg Lukács

Das Werk ◽

10.1515/9783110525885-017 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 419-476 ◽

Author(s):

Andrea Albrecht

Keyword(s):

Georg Lukacs ◽

Racionalismo e reificação em História e consciência de classe

Tempo Social ◽

10.11606/0103-2070.ts.2018.145907 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 30 (3) ◽

pp. 5-24

Author(s):

Ricardo Musse

Keyword(s):

Karl Marx ◽

Georg Lukacs ◽

História e consciência de classe é considerado, consensualmente, como um dos marcos de fundação do marxismo ocidental. Sua contribuição para a gênese da teoria crítica tampouco pode ser desprezada. O presente artigo procura mostrar como alguns conceitos decisivos do arcabouço teórico da Escola de Frankfurt foram desenvolvidos em 1923 por Georg Lukács. Destaca, sobretudo, os conceitos de reificação e racionalismo. História e consciência de classe considera a reificação, seguindo uma trilha aberta por Karl Marx, o fenômeno central da sociedade capitalista. O racionalismo é exposto em duas dimensões articuladas, na esfera do pensamento – em especial na ciência e na filosofia –, e no âmbito da vida material, como racionalidade econômica.

Hegel and Lukács on the Novel

Hegel Bulletin ◽

10.1017/s0263523200000045 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 31 (02) ◽

pp. 23-34 ◽

Author(s):

Allen Speight

Keyword(s):

Significant Influence ◽

The Novel ◽

Georg Lukacs ◽

Philosophy Of Literature ◽

The World ◽

Theory Of The Novel ◽

Prose Literature ◽

That Hegel was a significant influence on the young Georg Lukács'Theory of the Novelis a point few would dispute. Lukács himself insisted that the first part of TN represented his own transition from Kantian to Hegelian theory, and most critics have subsequently affirmed the importance of Hegel to Lukács' pre- (or, depending on one's view, proto-) Marxist argument inTN. Yet the two are in some ways strange to take together in the context of novelistic theory. Despite the profusion of novelistic literature in his own time and his own significant appropriation of it for the limning of essential moments of the development of the world-historical spirit, Hegel's officialAestheticshardly presents what one could claim to be an especially worked-outtheoryof the novel. TheAestheticstakes up literature in general primarily under the rubric of providing a theory of the genres ofpoetry— epic, lyric and dramatic — and what relatively few words Hegel actually devotes to the novel and prose literature in the lectures are tucked in corners: at the end of the discussion of the development of the epic, in the discussion of the historical form of the romantic, and in scattered comments elsewhere. As forTN, despite the strong connections some have drawn between Hegel and Lukács — Peter Demetz said that Lukács was ‘in a certain sense … the last Hegelian in the grand style’ (Demetz 1967: 215) — others have questioned whether Lukács' work should be regarded primarily as making a contribution to the philosophy of literature in the tradition from which Hegel writes.