English language: free yourself through criticism (how we should read without activist scholarship as there is more to life than race, gender, and identity; and power is not the only thing to delight in)

'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...