Why Did English Departments Abandon Ideas for Ideology?

How ideology replaced art in the literary academy

This article originally appeared in Eureka Street in January 2025.

The best essay I wrote in college argued that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was a proto-transgender text. I don’t mean that this essay was objectively more meritorious, better researched, or simply more unique than anything else I wrote for my English degree courses at Columbia University during my undergraduate years. Rather, I mean it was “the best” because it received glowing praise from my Shakespeare professor, a younger, recently-tenured woman who put a progressive spin on every Shakespeare play we analyzed; it also led to my only A+ that semester. My classmates were impressed, and my work momentarily inaugurated me among the ranks of the intellectual elite in my department — until, of course, the next essay that I wrote challenged predominant feminist scholarship around the poet Sylvia Plath and got me kicked out of my thesis program.

My aim in writing the Shakespeare essay was not to be facetious or to carry out a social experiment. Rather, by my junior year of college, I had identified certain themes and ideologies in the field of literary study that were guaranteed to lead to good grades. In order to succeed, a student must be sure to imbue every assignment with one or more of the “correct” sets of ideas. Yet as my grades skyrocketed, my morale declined. Soon enough, it dawned on me that in rewarding ideological conformity, literature departments were no longer teaching literature, they were teaching ideology.

This was not unique to Columbia, but a phenomenon common to English departments across the world where literary study has become home to far-left ideologues who view literature through the narrow lens of 21st century identitarianism — the phenomenon whereby literature is evaluated not based on objective merit, but rather on its function as a tool for furthering the political interests of certain identity groups.

So how did the study of literature undergo such a significant transition? This particular method of literary study originated in the postmodern intellectual movement in France and the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School in Germany, both of which sought to eradicate traditional, morality-based interpretations of literature, which we might dub a “liberal arts” or “classically liberal” approach to literature. While literary scholars of the early 20th century like Irving Babbitt and T.S. Eliot believed that literature should be instrumental in the development of moral character and that tradition was important to understanding the literature of the times, postmodern critics such as Roland Barthes insisted that authorship and historical context were irrelevant to literary hermeneutics, arguing that a reader’s personal interpretation of a given text should take precedence over its objective meaning. As the literary world began to disengage with notions of authorial intention and interpretations that stayed true to any intended meaning of a given work, it gave way to a moral relativism that set a foundation for the current approach dominating the wider literary academy.

Though Barthes’ 1967 essay “Death of the Author,” gave birth to ideas about the irrelevance of context and authorship, it was not conceptualized in a vacuum, nor were his ideas particularly radical for the late 1960s. The advent of worldwide social reform throughout the decade opened the academy up for more progressive ideas amongst members of the New Left. When the Marxist thinker Herbert Marcuse joined the faculty at Columbia University, he brought his theory of “repressive tolerance” to the literary sphere, arguing that traditional tolerance in society perpetuates repressive ideologies and that true liberation can occur only when society becomes intolerant of hierarchies based on race, class, gender, etc. Marcuse’s ideas found fertile ground in the academy, where scholars began questioning the notion that literature could be viewed outside of a sociopolitical context. Armed with good intentions, as literary critics became more concerned with a text’s direct relevance to contemporary struggles of marginalised communities, they began to emphasize the importance of identity and power dynamics over formalist or traditional readings of literature. In one sense, this marked a stark departure from Babbitt and Eliot’s vision for literature that held a moral and cultural purpose; in another sense, it adhered to it.

Around the same time in France, postmodern philosophers such Jacques Derrida, the founder of Deconstruction, made the claim that words held no objective meaning and were entirely open for interpretation. Derrida championed “binary opposition theory” which purports that in the context of “Western Metaphysics,” interactions between humans have always been a series of blacks and whites: man and woman, light and dark, civilized and uncivilized, hetero- and homosexual, etc. While Derrida’s primary aim of toppling the hierarchical structures set in place by Western Metaphysics might have been well-intentioned, the result was a descent into a rigid orthodoxy of thought that we see now in the academies, informing the core tenets of literary criticism. Several years later, when Derrida’s contemporary Michel Foucault adopted these ideas to the realm of gender, Twelfth Night suddenly became a play about transgenderism, and the approach of Babbitt and Eliot soon went the way of Shelley’s Ozymandias.

By the 21st century, literary study had transformed from an academic pursuit into a battleground for social justice, where the value of any given work was judged not on the grounds of any aesthetic or intellectual merit, but more by the political and social messages it conveyed, whether intended by the author or not.

The literary academy has now an intellectual playground for identity-based literary criticism — feminist, post-colonial, and queer theory — and seeks to challenge traditional, “mainstream” narratives through literary theory. This approach is not merely a matter of prioritizing an overly politicized interpretation over all possible interpretations through which scholars might understand, appreciate and evaluate literature. Rather, it has become the only acceptable way to study literature, with all dissenting viewpoints, like my own on Sylvia Plath, very much sidelined.

The problem is that any narrow-minded focus in literature — on identity, or any other similarly reductionist category — risks obscuring the broader, more universal themes that literature can and should address, resulting in an environment where literature is less about exploring the complexities of the human experience, touching on universals such as ambition, love, and death, to name a few, and more about advancing a particular socio-political agenda. In my experience, these agendas have little to do with texts in the English literary canon (though the very notion of the canon is on its way out as well) and have been imposed via European postmodernist thinkers.

Literary study, once a place for deep intellectual engagement, has thus been reduced to an exercise in ideological conformity, reducing literature to a mere political vehicle as it becomes abstracted from its former function and former glory as an art form.

And it must be noted that the problem with the postmodern worldview of literature is not that it seeks to promote a political agenda; it is that it fails to appreciate literature’s rightful place as a cornerstone of the humanistic tradition as works of art. To treat literature primarily as a vehicle for ideology is to misunderstand its essence and reduce its significance.

Of course, literature can and often does engage with politics. But to insist that every work must be reframed through the lenses of race, gender, or post-colonial grievance is to impose upon it a reductive view, born not of curiosity but of ideological certitude. Instead of a battleground for contemporary identity politics the canon is a repository of timeless insights into the human condition.

Yet today, professors and critics push a narrow orthodoxy that recasts all texts as inherently political, projecting onto them concerns that the authors never conceived. By forcing Homer, Shakespeare, or Austen into the molds of postmodern theory, we risk not only distorting their works but also failing to appreciate the universality that has ensured their relevance for generations. It is time to resist the myopia of ideological criticism and reassert that great literature, while occasionally political, also transcends the political. It speaks to what is enduring in human nature, not merely to the ephemeral grievances of our time. Literature in its highest form is an art, not a manifesto.

At its core, literature is a creative engagement with language to comment on the human condition in all its complexity. And political identity is just one small element of what makes us human. When a work’s value hinges primarily on how well it conforms to the prevailing ideological trends, it risks becoming transient, as a purely political literature risks losing its capacity to transcend its historical moment and speak to the deeper, more enduring truths of our shared humanity. Until we can restore literature to its rightful place amongst the humanistic tradition — and regard it, above all, as art — students of literature will continue to be rewarded for papers that overtly pander to current political and social movements like “Transgenderism in Twelfth Night,” and similar shallow exercises in presentism. If we are to restore literature to its rightful place as an art form within the humanistic tradition, we must resist this ideological reductionism. Only then can literature reclaim its role as a rich cultural endeavor that elevates, challenges, and, perhaps one day, dares to bring us together instead of tearing us apart.

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