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This essay connects Antonio Gramsci's expanded concept of Marxian ideology to his training in linguistics and, broadly understood, philosophy of language in order to advance a hypothesis regarding Gramsci's views on literary criticism and aesthetic judgment. This hypothesis can be summed up in the following way: aesthetic judgment, including literary criticism, maintains a unity of form and content while rejecting facile attempts to reduce the global meaning of a "political" work of art to its ideological content, where ideology is understood in the sense of a series of theoretical propositions about the world, which reside in the realm of traditional Marxist superstructure. As a result, there is no recourse to either a scientific objectivity or a relativistic emphasis on subjectivity in the evaluation of works of art; instead, priority is given to an immanent, contextual interpretation of works of literature and culture. Such a methodology is intimately related to Gramsci's reworked concept of ideology and therefore deserves further consideration. Keywords: Gramsci; Ideology; Philosophy of Language, Aesthetic Judgment.

The current study analyzes Gramsci's reflections on literature, focusing on recent research and with an emphasis on North American culture. Gramsci's influence is brought out and analyzed in the following works: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. an important collection of critical theory, and the debate between Marco Roth and Joseph North over the crisis in North American literary studies in a recent issue of the magazine n+1. Gramsci's thought can provide a solution to the methodological difficulties outlined in n+1. Showing his engagement with questions that have been examined in our own time by the theorists Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Gramsci presents a critical vision which puts universality and contingency in relation to one another. Gramsci's concept of hegemony—the subject of many different interpretations starting at the end of World War II—can, in fact, be understood as an unconscious structuring force that is continuously active. The relationship between politics and culture, from this perspective, becomes an effort to construct a counter-hegemony, which is characterized by a sense of redemption in the face of the dominant powers. In thinking about art and literature, Gramsci elaborates an original and innovative approach, in which the binary coordinates of western thought are abandoned in favor of contingency.