Quick questions on Marxist and postcolonial criticism explained: H2 Literature in English

A Marxist reading asks who holds economic power and who supplies the labour, and how the text represents that relationship. It is alert to the way wealth is often credited to owners or to abstractions ("the mill made the town rich") while the workers who produced it are erased. It notices whether the text presents class relations as natural and inevitable, which the lens calls ideology, or exposes them as constructed and unjust. Applied closely, it reads a loaded word, a credited profit, an invisible worker, as evidence about who benefits and who pays.

A postcolonial reading asks how a text handles empire and cultural difference: who is positioned as central and who as "other", whose perspective the narrative adopts, how the colonised are described, and whether they are granted a voice or merely spoken about. It is alert to descriptions that exoticise or dehumanise, to the silence of those without power in the text, and to the unspoken histories, conquest, slavery, extraction, on which a comfortable world may rest. Like the Marxist lens, it reads both what is foregrounded and what is suppressed.

What core question does a Marxist lens ask of a text? [2 marks]

What does a postcolonial lens attend to that a neutral reading might miss? [2 marks]

Why do both lenses attend to a text's silences? [3 marks]