Ira Shor

Anne Sexton's "For My Lover...": Feminism in the Classroom.

ing predominantly white Italian working-class students. My students arrive from high school with elaborately constructed ideology. A whole host of opinions on sexuality, war, racism, welfare, socialism, labor, and revolution has been imposed on them by their daily experience and by the authorities in their lives. Luckily, there is no unanimity in their manner of thinking, but their dominantly conservative mode of thought indicates how potent the bourgeois mass media, the conservative parochial and lower education systems, the patriarchal family, and the male-dominated job market remain in fashioning their consciousnesses. Radical education designed to foster counter-consciousness has to be as com-

Notes on Marxism and Method.

one or more of these approaches. Form and content treatments draw heavily on generic and stylistic concerns; theme and content criticism usually evolves from period studies as well as thematic materials. These categories most often appear in combination with each other, though diagramming them gives us a clearer understanding of what we all do. Bourgeois criticism has been able to evolve lengthy traditions in all four categories. Left criticism has been dominated by an attention to theme and content, with only a minority voice pursuing a social-history of form.1 The performance of marxist criticism has generally demonstrated a sociological interest in content which correctly rejects New Critical formalism and art for arts sake. However marxist anti-formalism