For the Marxist—whether in the days of the nineteenth-century theorist Plekhanov, or of Lenin, Trotsky, or Zhdanov, Stalin’s murderous commissar—the function of criticism, as of literature, has been to promote the cause of political revolution. When this less than purely literary aim has periodically come to light in the past, it has tended to cause a certain amount of dismay among those to whom Marxism represents an intellectual system like any other. In our own time, though, dismay has been replaced with complacency. It is now possible for an avowed Marxist literary critic—the British academic, Terry Eagleton—to assign a primarily political function to literature without causing so much as a raised eyebrow.
Eagleton’s impunity reflects the special status that Marxism has achieved in the academy. Regarded as something entirely apart from Communism, Marxism stands, virtually by definition, above political suspicion. Yet at the same time it is accorded a prestigious position in the vanguard of literary theory by virtue of its revolutionary political associations. This paradox has been a fruitful one for a dedicated ideologue like Terry Eagleton. Thus his current book, The Function of Criticism, both benefits from the comfortable integration of Marxism into current literary theory and exerts some of the special authority that permits Marxists to determine the direction most likely to be taken by literary discussion in the near future.
With his title, which echoes Matthew Arnold’s essay, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Eagleton boldly telegraphs his intention to
