THE ACCESSION OF TERRY EAGLETON to the Warton Professorship of English Literature at Oxford has caused a stir. Yet this final assimilation of the most eloquent of radical theorists into the Establishment has certain heartening implications. It proves, for instance, that the Establishment is in trim, efficiently practising the repressive tolerance which is the essence of its self-preservation. Even Bernard Bergonzi, author of 'The Terry Eagleton Story' (P·N·R 40) had second thoughts and supported the appointment. The Establishment is a sturdy structure, politic, ironic; it knows a market when it sees one. The age demanded, as it were.

Now Theory, in the diverse forms in which Eagleton has explored and espoused it, often with lucid facility, seldom without an edge of individual hubris, stands on an exposed eminence. English departments in universities and polytechnics entertained their subversives uneasily at first, but gradually found themselves conceding the flimsiness of their own humanistic commitments. Many departments in this country and abroad are now peopled by theorists of various persuasions and feel incomplete if one or another theoretical strand is not spoken for by at least one lecturer. An academic St Paul visiting such institutions might be tempted, among the teeming theoretical models, to point to the unnamed god that was their pretext - the poem, the novel, the essay - before being drummed off campus.

Once upon a time advertisements for tertiary posts called for scholars or critics with a specialism in, say, the 18th century. Now literature doesn't necessarily go back that far and scholarship is in less demand in the Academy. Scholars with their fusty disciplines are less of a draw than theorists who create and recreate their subject with the changes of the moon. Canonical stability, contextual study, the acquisition of basic reading skills which issue in acute response are no longer axiomatic. This is not an age of analysis and appraisal but of interrogating analysis and appraisal from defined perspectives, and then interrogating those perspectives in infinite recession from the text.

If Theory, as fluid and protean as Professor Eagleton's, has triumphed at Oxford, it suggests that 'literature', as it was understood by many and is still understood by some, may be delivered from academic bondage. Pharoah will not seek to restrain it: he will offer it safe passage across the Red Sea. At least it will be the case that readers who take delight in the poetry of our time or of the past will be less likely to pursue that delight into the groves of Academe, where Theory will be seen to have displaced Reading quite as thoroughly as Economics have displaced Politics in the public realm. The word has been set free.

Those who have been troubled by the subversion of English studies in recent years ought not to be downhearted about what has happened at Oxford, despite the damage it may have done to an already etiolated faculty. English as an academic discipline has been in crisis in part at least because it has failed the very values of the works, the forms and genres, that are its pretexts and that might be expected to qualify or subvert the very theories that have defused them. Readers can begin their subversions now, working against the large abstractions with the lived particulars of poems, novels, stories, essays, sermons. The conflicting theories on offer are tools indeed, but secondary tools. It is proper to interrogate our vested interests, our unstated ideologies. But when those questions have been raised, and answered as clearly as can be, we still read, we still respond, and the reality of that primary experience we know on the pulse. It cannot be subverted without lessening not only the value of the text, but of ourselves as readers and witnesses.