The identification of the latter will then lead to an evaluation of such codes or, in other words, of the “methods” or approaches current in American literary and cultural study today. Their juxtaposition with a dialectical or totalizing, properly Marxist ideal of understanding will be used to demonstrate the structural limitations of the other interpretive codes, and in particular to show the “local” ways in which they construct their objects of study and the “strategies of containment” whereby they are able to project the illusion that their readings are somehow complete and self-sufficient.
A Marxist reading is the best reading of text because it puts it in a historical reading of progression rather than the unsupported idea that texts are independent of one another.
