English Language: Free Yourself Through Criticism

How We Should Read Without Activist Scholarship, as There Is More to Life Than Race, Gender, and Identity

By: Deborah Cox-Walker

Narrated by: Helen Bowden

"Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature - Shakespeare, for example - can cease to be literature." These are the words of Terry Eagleton, the working-class Irish Marxist critic of English literature who believes that all literary theory is political.

Not only is his observation quite banal, but it does not qualify as literary criticism. It is journalistic writing, and its validity depends merely upon our definition of literature. Perhaps his definition is so generic as to encompass any random piece of published writing. In this case, anything in print would qualify as "literature" and anything out of print would not.

Indeed, there are many blue-collar workers who might describe a service manual as "the literature", so I guess, in the world that Terry Eagleton comes from, anything printed can be termed literature.

©2021 Deborah Cox-Walker (P)2021 Deborah Cox-Walker