More on criticism and ideology:
There is, in fact, no need to drag politics into literary theory: as with South African sport, it has been there from the beginning. I mean by the political no more than the way we organize our social life together, and the power relations this involves; … the history of modern literary theory is part of the political and ideological history of our epoch. … Indeed literary theory is less an object of intellectual enquiry in its own right than a particular perspective in which to view the history of our times. Eagleton, Literary Theory (169)
In other words, the study of criticism reveals the ideologies that pervade a place and time. The critic is both arbiter of that ideology – being a powerful force in its construction – and an at times unwitting victim – unable to escape the very same power structures he drags under his pen to critique.
