The Role Of Criticism?

The role of the contemporary critic, then, is a traditional one.
The point of the present essay is to recall criticism to it's traditional role, not to invent some fashionable new function for it. For a new generation of critics in western society english literature is now an inherited label for a field within which many diverse preoccupations congregate: semiotics, psychoanalysis, film studies, cultural theory, the representation of gender, popular writing, and of course the conventionally valued writings of the past. These pursuits have no obvious unity beyond a concern with the symbolic processes of social life, and the social production of forms of subjectivity. Critics who find such pursuits modish and distastefully new-fangled are, as a matter of cultural history, mistaken. They represent a contemporary version of the most venerable topicsof criticism, before it was narrowed and impoverished to the so called literary canon. Moreover, it is possible to argue that such an enquiry
might contribute in a modest way to our very survival. For it is surely becoming apparent that without a more profound understanding of such symbolic processes, through which political power is deployed, reinforced, resisted, at times subverted, we shall be incapable of unlocking the most lethal power-struggles now confronting us. Modern criticism was born of a struggle against the absolutist state; unless it's future is now defined as a struggle against the bourgeois state, it might have no future at all. Eagleton1984.