Questions to Consider

1. What role does class play in the work and what is the author’s analysis of class relations?
2. How do characters overcome oppression?
3. Does the writer display a sensitivity towards the exploitation of the poor?
4. In what ways does the work serve as propaganda for the status quo, or does it try to undermine it?
5. Are values that support the dominant economic group given privilege? This can happen tactically, in the way in which values are taken to be self-evident.
6. Does this text support prevailing power relationships or challenges them?
7. Whose story gets told in the text? Are lower economic groups ignored or devalued?
8. Does the work propose some form of utopia vision as a solution to the problems encountered in the work?
9. What does literature say about our culture (power structures, values, social conscious) during the writer’s time and the book’s time?