ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that literature can subvert ideological thinking. Bourgeois ideology asserts that social inequality, because it "inspires widely and generally the hopes of rising and the fears of falling in society, is unquestionably the best calculated to develop the energies and faculties of man". Literature has great potential as a means to subvert rationales for inequity. The chapter focuses on two effects of student engagement with literature. First, it can offer "more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together". Second, it can provide a window onto the class perspectives of people very different from themselves, and thereby inspire an empathy which undercuts stereotypes and notions of capitalism as a just system in a just world. Bakan identified two modes of human existence: agency and communion. Agency is self-focus; communion is other-oriented. Narcissism leads people to identify with hierarchies and groups in a "caricature of true, conscious solidarity".
