Ideology and Form: Novels at Work

"aesthetic" and the "social".

separate the for-mal from the ideological?
1. According to a writer's political/critical predisposition, ideology, rarely a neutral designation, readily
adapts to praise or blame.
2. One can plausibly condemn anyone of opposing views as excessively or insufficiently ideological.
3. Raymond Williams
4. "Histori-cally, [the] sense of ideology as the set of ideas which arise from a given set of material
interests has been at least as widely used as the sense of ideology as illusion."'
5. The largely concealed structure of values which informs and underlies our factual statements is part of
what is meant by "ideology." By "ideology" I mean, roughly, the ways in which what we say and believe
connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in ....
6. I do not mean by "ideology" simply the deeply entrenched, often unconscious beliefs which people hold;
I mean more particularly those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have some
kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power.'
7. In other words, ideology designates a system of ideas and feelings derived from assumptions associated
with society's structural arrangements.
8. All literary criticism carries ideological implications.
9. Formal and social considerations intertwine in textual arrangements,
10. Form is a medium of meaning.
11. The more conventional the form, the more likely it is to express social arrangements assumed as given.
12. social and theological commitments.