“Some literary students and critics are likely to be worried by the idea that a literary text does not have a single ‘correct’ meaning, but probably not many. They are more likely to be engaged by the idea that the meanings of a text do not lie within them like wisdom teeth within a gum, waiting patiently to be extracted, but that the reader has some active role in this process. Nor would many people today be disturbed by the notion that the reader does not come to the text as a kind of cultural virgin, immaculately free of previous social and literary entanglements, a supremely disinterested spirit or blank sheet on to which the text will transfer its own inscriptions. Most of us recognize that no reading is innocent or without presuppositions. But fewer people pursue the full implications of this readerly guilt. One of the themes of this book has been that there is no such thing as a purely ‘literary’ response: all such responses, not least those to literary form, to the aspects of a work which are sometimes jealously reserved to the ‘aesthetic’, are deeply imbricated with the kind of social and historical individuals we are. In the various accounts of literary theories I have given so far, I have tried to show that there is always a great deal more at stake here than views of literature — that informing and sustaining all such theories are more or less definite readings of social reality. It is these readings which are in a real sense guilty, all the way from Matthew Arnold’s patronizing attempts to pacify the working class to [Martin] Heidegger’s Nazism. Breaking with the literary institution does not just mean offering different accounts of [Samuel] Beckett; it means breaking with the very ways literature, literary criticism and its supporting social values are defined.”
— Terry Eagleton, “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory,” Literary Theory: An Introduction
