ABSTRACT
Literary criticism, as we know it, has well over a century of accredited activity behind it. It has developed a language which absolutely saturates the field and holds powerful and entrenched positions within the bastions of academia. Through their grip on examination boards and their control over the training of teachers, the literature departments of our universities effectively determine both what literature should be taught and how it should be taught —what questions should be put to it-throughout the entire context of secondary and tertiary education. In this way, the discourses of literary criticism developed at the frontiers of academic life reach back, through a variety of well-worn institutional paths, to condition the ways in which literary texts are used within those ideological processes by which we, millions of us, make sense, or have sense made for us, of our lives.
