ABSTRACT
This does not mean that works of literature cannot criticize ideology. They may do so either openly or as a function of the way literary language signifies. An example of the first would be George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It is harder to offer an example for the second since this is always highly particular to any given work and requires the sort of analysis for which there is no space here. The idea is that literary language so transforms ordinary, ideological language that we are able to see what is either repressed or contradictory about it. In this way, literature,
according to the French Marxist, Louis Althusser (1918-90), gives us knowledge of ideology. This insight was systematically developed by Pierre Macherey in his A Theory of Literary Production (1978).
