ABSTRACT
The objection is less that criticism has never enjoyed quite the power Arnold suggests, than that such power as it has exercised has derived from its selective deployment within specific institutional and discursive contexts. Although proceeding as if speaking to everyone, its circulation has been remarkably restricted with the result that it has often played an important role in the
symbolic processes through which social strata are culturally differentiated. Yet the universalising ambitions which marked criticism’s nineteenth-century formation linger on and, strangely enough, nowhere with more weight and persistence than in Marxist thought. Whereas deconstruction tends to reverse Arnold’s emphasis in concerning itself with the ‘thousand special questions which may be raised about any book’ rather than with the more general social or cultural influence of a literary text, the greater part of contemporary Marxist critical theory has sought to enlist literary criticism in support of a generalised form of social and cultural commentary.
