Some foundations for modern and postmodern thinking:

 For Hegel and Marx (and Foucault and others too) all ideas and concepts must be looked at and regarded historically; as being embedded in ways of life, and thus in societies, and when society changes ideas and concepts change too. Ideas do not exist in the abstract and are not timeless and unchanging but, again, as always embodied in societies and institutions, ie: in historical realities which change.....

......there are no absolute truths, there is no fixed human nature, and what we think of as “reality” is always and only a manufactured reality. There are in fact as many “realities” out there as there are ideologies which construct them......none of us are free, or ever can be free of ideology. All of us are conditioned by inbuilt and often unconscious mindsets to act in certain predictable ways. Our life scripts are, in fact, written for us....

What we are told are “truths” about the world are not really truths but ideological assertions.

We need to look at how the so-called “masterpieces” of western literature have been complicit in the process of keeping white, western, heterosexual males on top and depriving women, people of colour and people of non-normative sexual orientation of power......

Nietzsche as the intellectual precursor of much post-structuralist and postmodern thought.......Nietzsche was on to something when he pointed out that humans find it very hard to be objective and rational. Most of us as individuals and groups have been guilty of reconstructing our own history in a way that makes us the hero and the other party the villain AND there have been many instances in which so-called historical, philosophical and even scientific “truths” have turned out to be heavily distorted. Power elites in every society HAVE used the slipperiness of language to try and foist their construction of “truth” on to minorities BUT does this have to mean:

There is never anything that is objectively true? Great literature is just another source of misinformation? All that can be discerned in great western  literature are the ideological assertions of western patriarchy and western capitalism and western white supremacy? Is it wrong to believe that many great western writers still speak to us across the ages because they do offer us wisdom and insights about our common human nature?

How about, for example, a great 20th black, female poet can read and love Shakespearean sonnets and even claim it seems to her as though some must have been written by a black woman?

(NB ! Google: Wikipedia entry for ideology, and add a summary of that entry to this blog, OK?)