What is Cultural Materialism?
An approach to literary and cultural analysis that seeks to understand how culture and society influence each other.
The Sociocultural Dance: Understanding Cultural Materialism in Literature
Cultural materialism is an approach to literary and cultural analysis that seeks to understand how society and culture influence each other. It views culture as a material force that is shaped by economic and political power structures, and that these power structures are often reflected in the literature produced by a society or culture.
This approach sees literary works as products of their historical contexts and social conditions, and argues that they can be used to understand the cultural and ideological systems that underpin them. It seeks to understand how meaning is created in literary works, and how these works reflect the ideological struggles that occur within a society or culture.
Cultural materialism acknowledges the importance of historical context and the social, economic, and political conditions in which a text was created, and recognizes that these conditions can influence the themes, characters, and symbols present in a work of literature. Through this perspective, literary analysis involves an examination of both the content and form of literary works, as well as an exploration of the historical and sociocultural contexts in which they were produced.
In sum, cultural materialism offers a way to both understand and critique literature as a reflection of the sociocultural dance between individuals and the culture they inhabit.
Cultural materialism seeks to understand how cultural and societal factors shape literature through analyzing historical and sociocultural concepts. Here are two examples of texts analyzed through this lens:
Cultural materialists interpret The Hunger Games as a commentary on class structure in modern societies, particularly the United States, and a reflection of the capitalist structure of production and consumption under which it operates, where the wealthy classes dominate and the poor struggle for survival.
Cultural materialists identify The Waste Land as a reflection of the contemporary crisis of values and meaning - the disillusionment, fragmentation, and alienation of modern society - brought on by the first World War. They argue that Eliot's work critiques societal norms imposed by the ruling classes and exposes the moral decay of human society.