In my High-School English class we of course learned quite a bit about Literary Criticism, and one of the major forms of criticism is Marxist criticism. I am fairly confident in my knowledge of Marxist theory, although not so much Marxist Literary Criticism and I still have a long ways to go. However the explanation we got of Marxist literary criticism seemed to me to have several glaring contradictions with Marxism. I'm going to give a few quotes followed by my understanding, my question is whether it is I who is mistaken or the teacher, or whether Marxist Literary Criticism has just diverged from Marxism:

• "[Marx's] major argument was that whoever controlled the means of production in society controlled the society - whoever owned the factories 'owned' the culture. This idea is called 'dialectical materialism'" - that is not what dialectical materialism is as far as I know, and while that is a reasonable summary of Marx's view of culture, that is much different from dialectical materialism
• "Marxists believed literature could instigate revolution" - I'm pretty sure that goes against historical materialism and the thing I just quoted above

This probably seems a little nitpicky but whatever, this is basic Marxism at least it seems to me.