Oppose the dominant wisdom.
- Question the common meaning or theories of the text
- Start form a place of critical oppositions
- Only assumption: the meaning of the text is unreliable
Look for cultural bias.
- Look for binaries or hierarchical oppositions
- Certain words and the concept they represent are privileged or emphasized more than the opposing words and concepts
- Example: a writer referring to an object in nature as a male show that the text may have a male bias
Analyze the sentence structure.
- If the author makes a person or thing in a story represented as an object in the text, making it inferior
- Example: a male always initiating actions in the text can represent the male’s power over the other character
Marxist Literary Theory 