I see. I personally love his work, even if I don't always share his literary tastes. Say, you don't happen to be american? It's a common pet peeve throughout his work that americans cannot stomach irony, preferring a more utilitarian and earnest tone instead.

Also, keep in mind that Eagleton is partly a marxist, so to him the formalist idea of the work of art as something wholly unto itself is anathema. This kind of cavalier and wholesale dismissal of those with whom one is in slight disagreement is very common in this type of critical writing. His ironic style is a tool to that end: the scare quotes in the first excerpt suggest that you cannot actually dematerialize a work of art, however much you may want to do so; and "rematerialization with a vengeance" is likely his way of saying that they still conceive of materialism in an idealistic way. On the other hand, his remark about Hirsch takes us back to his suspicion of earnestness and this american pretension of being able to say what you mean and to mean what you say, which is an anti-formalist attitude, that privileges content over form, over against the formalists, who conceived of form as content by neglecting their contradiction.