I'm an insider. I have a PhD in English and taught at university, in the South, for over 30 years. I'm now a kind of recovering academic.

What you describe is sort of what I did, in literature and composition courses alike, in my research and  service in the univeristy and community.  I always presented sociohistorical "facts" for what they are: questions, problems, debates, conflicts. Literature records these, sometimes encoded, sometimes explicitly. 

This would throw people off balance and encourage them to examine their assumptions. I taught mainly American literature, with its short time frame and cycling of specific problems that are never really resolved, so in teaching about earlier periods I was always trying to give students a vocabulary for our time.