2) Marx: Whoever has the means of production controls the mental productions. They can cause you to think things that you may not really feel by manipulating your material and cultural experience through economic control. Reading literature critically means attending to these historical coercions and the signs of struggle against (or complicity with) hegemonic power in literary representation.
3) Althusser: ISAs produce the power to coerce through ideas, which are the assumptions that are common to a group. These are in contrast to SAís: the fear of violence or direct recrimination from a government or other power. Althusser brings together elements of materialist and psychoanalytic understanding in his notion of the ISA, which is a way to think through both the individual and the social dimensions of identity formation in literature.
4) Freud: All conscious and unconscious actions can be sorted back to childhood tendencies and desires. Understanding that these more basic desires structure our conscious, rational lives can help us to identify certain tendencies, fixations, or displacements that emerge in literature.
5) Derrida: The work of language is a tricky and unstable business. In literary writing, where the ostensible meaning of the text is woven into form, representation, and the artistic expression of ideas, we find that those instabilities come out to play. Deconstruction proposes that pinpointing meaning in a literary text is by definition impossible, and instead looks to the slippages and binaries of the text, where we can generate a reading of the textís symptomatic instabilities.
6) Lacan: The psychological domain laid out by Freud works, in fact, more like Derridaís notion of deconstruction in that the unconcious is structured like a language. The need for an Other (rather than simply mother) and the anxieties about a fragmented self in a state of perpetual imperfection become central questions of existence. These needs and anxieties are writ large in literary texts which try to explore the experience of the individual.
7) Foucault: The modern subject has been produced through disciplines,
institutions, and practices that are all aimed at imbedding the effects
of power in our everyday lives. When we police ourselves by confessing
desires, seeing ourselves in terms of social "types" (the criminal, the
pervert, the insane), and participating in the work of surveillance, we
are producing our lives in terms of social structures or disciplines that
claim to be objective but in fact wield power. Any subject, however,
is at the intersection of competing discourses, the tensions of which can
become the focus of literary representation or social event. Consequently,
a reading of a literary text in these terms may well return the critic
to historical or cultural questions about the social context of the text.
For Derrida, this insight gets expressed as the unstable relationship of speaking to writing, the mythology of origins, and the destabilizing binaries that are very much exposed in literary texts. The post-structuralist turn in thinking about the subject that is represented in Lacan and Foucault says that the individual may not be the center of meaning, and that history, language, society, and culture construct or produce us as subjects. The whole notion of identity as the coherent, in-control, pre-existing self is, in this view displaced by the insight that the subject, constructed and subject to change, is produced by the world she thought she controlled. For Lacan, this is about the relationship of an individual psyche to the linguistic problem of making meaning in a state of lack; for Foucault, it is about the production of subjectivities through social and institutional discourses like schools, hospitals, the language of psychology and criminology, and the state.