Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Faultlines (1992)
Societies need to produce materially to continue—they need food, shelter, warmth; goods to exchange with other societies; a transport and information infrastructure to carry those processes. Also, they have to produce ideologically. […] They need knowledges to keep material production going—diverse technical skills and wisdoms [sic] in agriculture, industry, science, medicine, economics, law, geography, languages, politics, and so on. And they need understandings, intuitive and explicit, of a system of social relationships within which the whole process can take place more or less evenly. Ideology produces, makes plausible, concepts and systems to explain who we are, who the others are, how the world works.
Here's how the Marxist sees the world. Literature is last but not least: you can't eat books or make a house out of them—not even the three little pigs tried that one—but novels, plays, and poems make sense of our lives. That's something that people find important.
According to Sinfield, humans live to make meaning, or ideology. Literature, like art and religion, is a meaning- or ideology-making machine.