Lukács and Reflection Theory

Yahyanejad, Hani; Shabanirad, Ensieh

doi:10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.61.145

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Lukács and Reflection Theory

This article has been retracted.

Is referred to by “Retraction Notice: H. Yahyanejad and E. Shabanirad, "Lukács and Reflection Theory", International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, Vol. 61, pp. 145-154, 2015”, International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, Vol. 88, p. 28, 2020”.

The manuscript was published in the journal The AnaChronisT in the year 2004 while in International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences in 2015. Thus, the article was subjected to retraction to eliminate the redundant publication and discouraging the efforts on duplicate publication malpractice. The editors would like to apologize to the Journal’s readers for the late case detection. We tend to publish original scientific manuscripts only. We sincerely appreciate the efforts of anyone who brings such matters to our attention. All authors of [1] have been informed about the decision to retract the article [1] and agreed to the retraction. Thus, the paper has been declared retracted and marked accordingly.

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Abstract:

This essay claims that the rejection of Lukács’s realism is quite problematic, in the sense that his opponents such as Adorno and Althusser symbolically used the name of Lukács and perpetuated the suspicion of Lukács’s compromise with Stalinism. The essay argues that Lukács’s model of reflection is not couched in Stalin’s socialist realism, a theory that assumes the transparency between aesthetic forms and reality, but rather raises the essential problems of the condition of writers in capitalist society. Lukács’s realism aims at providing a practical strategy to overcome cultural reification, focusing on the mediation between an author and his material condition. An investigation of Lukács’s realism reveals that Lukács’s way of understanding realism arises from his emphasis on objectivity rather than subjective reflection such as Kantian philosophy. The essay claims that this is the kernel of Lukácsean reflection theory signified by an aesthetic of realism definitively opposed to Stalin’s socialist realism. From this perspective, the essay takes Althusserian Marxism as the occasion to stage a wide consideration of anti-realism. It proposes to elucidate the implicit assumptions behind the decline of Lukács’s realism, and the reification of cultural fields that gradually came to dominate Western literary apparatuses.

Info:

Periodical:

International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences (Volume 61)

Pages:

145-154

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.61.145

Citation:

H. Yahyanejad and E. Shabanirad, "Lukács and Reflection Theory", International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, Vol. 61, pp. 145-154, 2015

Online since:

October 2015

Authors:

Hani Yahyanejad, Ensieh Shabanirad

Keywords:

Adorno, Althusser, Lukács, Marxism, Realism, Reflection Theory

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References:

[1] Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Print.

[2] Georg Lukács, Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London: Verso, 1983.Print.

[3] Georg Lukács, Narrate or Describe?, in Writer and Critic, trans. Arthur Kahn, London:Merlin Press, 1978. Print.

[4] Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.Print.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203820292

[5] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller ,Oxford: Oxford University Press,1977. Print.

[6] Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.Print Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. A&C Black, 2004. Print.

[7] Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness .MIT Press, 1971. Print.

[8] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan, 1929.Print.

[9] Béla Királyfalvi, The Aesthetics of György Lukács .Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.Print.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/221023977x00313

[10] Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought, trans. Nicholas Jacobs. MIT Press. 1971. Print.

[11] Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin Press, 1975. Print.

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