Interesting note over at Stan Apps' blog about image and reification in Lukacs.

"Image" is actually central to Lukacs' literary criticism, in that the issue of realism and artist reflection, a la Hamlet, is described as an "image." He does embrace that visual metaphor. In his Marxist aesthetics, reification in realism is the result of a certain kind of mirroring, specifically realism that doesn’t engage the social and economic processes behind the details, that doesn't have any kind of dialectic behind it. He consistently returns to the visual language when talking about what he thinks the realism of dialectical materialism should be in art: the never ending dialectic of appearance and reality, often approached as confronting contradictions. He actually says that fantastic writing does this quite effectively and that the free play of imagination and unrestrained fantasy are fully compatible with Marxist ideas of "realism". He's totally into E.T.A. Hoffmann and the fantastical writings of Balzac.