1. Intro to Criticism and Ideology
Economic Systems and Gender Systems and why that matters for stories

2. Why these ideas in lit class?
Literature takes place within the world, and all of the various conflicts its plots present and changes its characters go through reflect ongoing realities. The reason we look at ideas from the social world (and disciplines like sociology, cultural studies, gender studies, etc) is that stories that talk about the world inevitably reflect, comment on, and complicate these ideas.

3. ‘Marxism’ and ‘Feminism’
The origin of these ideas is also not as important as you might at first think. For instance many of the ideas about social class and economics come from Marxist theorists, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a Marxist or subscribe to Marx’s theory of economics and social change to use them. Indeed the reason why we call them Marxist is that, from about , the main critical concepts about our economic model and its effects on culture were made by critics influenced by Marx. Most of them were sociologists or anthropologists or literary critics and not economists per se, so they were really just commenting on culture, humanity, etc as a system and that’s how we’ll use them.

4. The Ideas are Accurate Criticism, Even if You Don’t Like What They Do With Them
In other words, they had a certain motivation to observe things about social class and culture, but you don’t have to share that same motivation to benefit from their perspective. And more or less everyone acknowledges that their observations are correct—they just disagree about how that matters, what it says about our economic systems and culture.

5. ‘Feminist Theory’ generally just means ‘Gender Systems Theory’
Similar story for ‘feminism’ and gender theory: feminist critics from the same time period (about ) developed many theories of how gender systems work because they wanted to show alternatives to the systems they felt were marginalizing and dis-empowering women. But you don’t have to identify as a hardcore feminist to follow their ideas and get some of their insights about how gender systems work. Those ideas are just facts and we get to use them to do different things, and to give us new perspectives on stories.

6. Classism and Sexism: The Big Ones
The idea behind these is very big and broad, and fairly simple: one particular group is seen to be more worthy, more important, and more privileged than another group. These are the basic ideas behind class and gender criticism, but note that they aren’t very useful on their own precisely because they’re so big. They’re hard to make arguments about because they aren’t very specific and so many things could fit within them.
In economic theory, the basic idea is that the upper class used to be (and still is in many ways) seen as better. The old concept of Social Darwinism—the economy will determine who survives and who doesn’t, and the best will naturally rise to the top—was the main target of early Marxists, but the concept is still around today because many people still think that economic success somehow relates to moral superiority or a kind of general superiority. Rich white men for many years were the only ones who held political office in the US; that’s not quite as true now as then changing but many people still believe that people from lower classes are stupider, have less inherent moral character or integrity, or aren’t strong enough

7. Commodification and price tags
Commodification: this idea often gets overused or exaggerated, but the concept at its core is simple: within a capitalist system, relationships between people and objects generally have . On one level, this means walking into a store and seeing a pair of pants as a pretty object and a price tag—and not as the product of 55 hours of work done by 21 different laborers in 3 countries, etc. We simplify the relationship to the world and people to economic terms rather than the complex social reality that it is.
The other main idea here is just that everything has a price tag. Of course people still value things that don’t make money—things like family, entertainment, beauty, etc—but within capitalism the economic factor (the price tag) is always lurking. Everything can be monetized and it will: even those things we do without thinking of money (like love or fun) are sold to us in different ways, and many many people make their living off them.

8. Ideology: Not necessarily false, but distracts you from the full reality
An ‘Ideology’ is basically an idea or vision that allows you to make sense of an extremely complicated reality by simplifying it in some way or other. For instance, certain types of extremist thought are generally considered ‘ideological’ rather than practical: a religious fundamentalist believes that a handful of moral rules are all that matters in a society, meaning they don’t have to deal with all the complexities of the real world—especially the economy, which is a system that works without a morality to it and that requires you to interpret a morality. Ideologies allow you to get around the complexities and just say, ‘this is how I feel about this.’

9. Religion as the ‘opiate of the masses’
This is the simplest example of an ideology, though it’s one that makes a little less sense now than in the s period. Basically the idea is that, if you understand the world and your ultimate role within it via religious morality, you will often be overlooking your role within a capitalist or social class system. So for example a Catholic priest in Ireland in the 1880s telling his impoverished congregation that our real lives are in heaven and we should simply accept the burden of being poor workers colonized by the rich people in England. This might help them feel better for a while but it denies the fact that they are part of a class system and are suffering while other people benefit from them. It’s called an ‘opiate’ since it causes people to feel better about bad situations by distracting them from the realities. (For Marxists, of course, the point was to accept that each class was in battle with the other, and to set up a system that was fair and equitable for all).

10. The ‘American Dream’
This particular ideology is the idea and vision that everyone can have a good job, with a house and a car and a yard and family if they wish, with everything in order and everyone taking care of their own business. The reason it’s an ‘ideology’ is that it simplifies the realities of the United States: for example, ignoring that there aren’t enough middle-class jobs for everyone to have one, that the capitalist system is constantly shifting and creating big changes in wealth and production (which means that companies uproot themselves, ways of making things change constantly, people go broke and get rich all the time, etc). The calm vision behind the ‘American Dream’ is indeed the reality for many people who are part of middle-class existence, but it’s not the full picture of the US economy or social world. It simplifies things to stay coherent and pleasant, so it’s an ‘ideology.’

11. ‘Rugged Individualism’
This ideology is somewhat related but has more to do with images and stories. It pops up in things like adventure stories, action movies, and westerns, as well as tales of millionaires and other successful people. The images are about a person who bravely set out under harsh circumstances and wins by toughness and self-reliance. There’s nothing wrong with those stories or nothing immoral about them by themselves, and they often help us get through tough patches or stay focused in our own work. But we call them ideologies because the fact that the capitalist system requires people to compete against each other and constantly create their own opportunities means that this idea can get oversized or over-emphasized in our culture.
In other words, by continually watching stories about this type of person, we start to think of the world in those terms: everything is a competition and we must quietly strive to succeed in a cutthroat world. Again that’s not immoral by itself but it cuts off parts of reality—e.g. that we can’t all succeed, and success is often about luck and cheating more than simple hard work—and it also emphasizes the individual above the community. It focuses only on one vision of society and blocks out the others, making it seem like the world can only be seen in one way.