What do Marxist literary critics do with texts? What questions do they ask?

• They explore ways in which the text reveals ideological oppression of a dominant economic class over subordinate classes. In order to do this a Marxist might ask the following questions:
  • Does the text reflect or resist a dominant ideology? Does it do both?
  • Does the main character in the text affirm or resist dominant class values?
  • Whose story gets told in the text? Are lower economic groups ignored or devalued?
  • What values does it reinforce and what values does it degrade?
  • Are values that support the dominant economic group given privilege? This can happen tacitly, in the way in which values are taken to be self-evident.
  • What social classes do the characters represent?
  • How do the characters from different social classes interact?
• They look at the conditions of production for the work. For example, they ask:
  • What were the economic conditions for publication of a work?
  • Who was the audience? What does the text suggest about the values of this audience?
  • What is the social class of the author?

What other approaches resemble Marxist literary criticism?

• Marxist literary criticism often shares with feminist criticism a desire to challenge the power structures in contemporary society. For feminist, the issue is a marginalized gender; for Marxists, the issue is not gender but economic power, leading to political power.
• Marxist literary criticism can also be viewed as a type of cultural criticism, in that it seeks to analyze a discourse (of power) that makes up one of the discourses that determine a text's historical meaning.

  

Works Cited

Assumption College. http://www1.assumption.edu/users/ady/hhgateway/gateway/Marxistlitcrit.html. 29 Oct. 2013