9/30/08

Three

“To understand the text well it must be detached from these contexts and studied in isolation.”

Through this tenet of liberal humanism, it states that the only way that a person can understand the true meaning of a text is to view it with no attachments and to read it as is. Matthew Arnold states, “To see the object as in itself it really is”. This shows that liberal humanism does not believe that a meaning of a text derives from its background (time, author).
Marxist criticism would disagree completely with this tenet. Marxism believes the idea that society is driven by money and economy. It believes that it is derived from the background of the author and the time frame the piece was written in. Barry states, “the essential Marxist view is that the latter things are not ‘innocent’, but are ‘determined’ (or shaped) by the nature of the economic base. This belief about culture, known as economic determinism, is a central part of traditional Marxist thinking”.

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