Marxism and Literature (Raymond Williams)

“This book is written in a time of radical change. Its subject, Marxism and Literature. is part of this change. Even twenty years ago, and especially in the English·speaking countries, it would have been possible to assume, on the one hand. that Marxism is a settled body of theory or doctrine, and, on the other hand, that Literature is a settled body of work. or kinds of work, with known general Qualities and properties. A book of this kind might then reasonably have explored problems of the relations between them or, assuming a certain relationship, passed Quickly to specific applications. The situation is now very different. Marxism, in many fields. and perhaps especially in cultural theory has experienced at once a significant revival and a related openness and flexibility of theoretical development. Literature, meanwhile, for related reasons, has become problematic in quite new ways.” (from the introduction)

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Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Mike Featherstone)

“I first became interested in consumer culture in the late 1970s. The stimulus was the writings of members of the Frankfurt School and other proponents of Critical Theory which were featured and discussed so well in journals like Telos and New German Critique. The theories of the culture industry, reification, commodity fetishism and the instrumental rationalization of the world directed attention away from a focus on production towards consumption and processes of cultural change.” (excerpt from “Preface to the First Edition”)

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Mythologies (Roland Barthes)

“This book has a double theoretical framework: on the one hand, an ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass culture; on the other, a first attempt to analyse semiologically the mechanics of this language. I had just read Saussure and as a result acquired the conviction that by treating ‘collective representations’ as sign-systems, one might hope to go further than the pious show of unmasking them and account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature.” (Preface)

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Mensahe sa PAKSA Hinggil sa Tungkulin ng mga Kadre sa Larangan ng Kultura (Jose Maria Sison)

“Angkop na angkop ang pagkakapili sa paksa ng kongreso, “Panitikan Mula sa Masa Tungo sa Masa.” Ipinapakita nito ang namumukod na katangian ng PAKSA bilang progresibo at makabayang organisasyon ng mga manunulat, kritiko, guro’t estudyante ng panitikan na buo ang kapasyahang maglingkod sa sambayanan.” -JM Sison

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The Culture Industry (Theodor Adorno)

“The term culture industry was perhaps used for the first time in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of ‘mass culture’. We replaced that expression with ‘culture industry’ in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme. The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses
and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. The individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit into each other, ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap…” -Theodor Adorno

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The Cultural Turn (Fredric Jameson)

“In a brief compass, The Cultural Turn traces the movement of one of the leading cultural intelligences of our time, in pursuit of the mutable forms of the postmodern world. The results will leave few indifferent.” (from Perry Anderson’s foreword)

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Struggle for National Democracy (Jose Maria Sison)

“This book is a historical record of the legal struggle for national liberation and democracy against U.S. imperial- ism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism in the 60s and early 70s. It was the principal legal study material in discussion groups and schools of national democracy which educated the youth cadres and militants from 1967 through the First Quarter Storm of 1970 to the declaration of martial law in 1972.

This book was the direct precursor of Philippine Society and Revolution. As a matter of fact, the two books were like partners in the education of cadres and mass activists in the course of the First Quarter Storm of 1970.” (taken from the Introduction)

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