9/24/07-

After reading Antonio Gramsci’s The Intellectuals, there appears an influential concept of hegemony that is present in ‘Rudolph’s Shiny New Economy’ and ‘Girl’ and ‘A Marxist Critical Reading of Great Expectation’. Collectively these works embody Williams’s concept of Marxist ideology, ultimately helping to bring awareness and value to such literary works.
Gramsci states that “All men are potentially intellectuals in the sense of having an intellect and using it, but not all are intellectuals by social functions” (p1). The social functions described here can be looked upon as fetters set upon us by our own society. The fetters constitute the very concept of hegemony, which are the social, cultural, ideological, or economical influence exerted by a dominant group.
Hegemony is heavily present in ‘Rudolph’s Shiny New Economy’. With the in depth Marxist reading of the work, we get a Marxist ideological understanding of the all the distinct characters that embody the forward movement into Communism. Alone, Rudolph is useless, due to his radical deformed red nose. Alone, Herbie is nothing more than “an elf… who doesn’t fit into the elf norm since he would rather be a dentist than work at the traditional elf occupation”. Alone, Yukon is just an unsuccessful prospector. Alone the Abominable Snowmonster, is nothing more than a scary monster. With the role of the Santa, which plays as a social function, the characters join a collective (communistic) force, so as to make Christmas happen. In the end they are nothing more than an equal product of labor force. The Marxist message here is simply that of the Three Musketeers; “All for one, and one for all.”

Hegemony is also present in Kincaid’s ‘Girl’. It is very clear that there is a bigger picture than the relationship between a mother and a daughter. On a grand spectrum, the mother embodies the social restraint put forward by the society on an individual. The society molds the individual from the way one eats to the way one spits.
In ‘A Marxist Critical Reading of Great Expectations’ it is very clear that the protagonist Pip is facing a class struggle, work and debt. And as Marx’s puts it “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”(p, 1). Which is non-the-less characterized by the very concept of hegemony.
The most important aspect of all literature is criticism. Criticism opens doors to many questions. Without the proper frame of reference, and conceptual background knowledge, a reader cannot scope in and out of any literary work, as a means to make room for questions and proper criticism.