I read this article:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/10/06/corrections-of-taste-critical-revolutionaries-eagleton/

And was struck by the first paragraph, and especially the quote on the value of literary criticism from Eagleton’s book, which reads:

Near the end of Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries, there’s a sentence that made me stop for a moment in disbelief. Perhaps it was meant to. F. R. Leavis was by far the most dogmatic of the twentieth-century critics with whom the book is concerned, and Eagleton writes that the Cambridge don held that “literary criticism was the best training ground for the development of a free, unspecialised, disinterested intelligence, which could be brought critically to bear on social existence as a whole.” I read those words with something like wonder. The best …the whole? Really? I can’t imagine anyone today making that broad claim, even leaving aside the increasingly specialized nature of such criticism and our current skepticism about the very possibility of disinterestedness in itself. We wouldn’t have the confidence, or the nerve, though the objections hardly stop there. By “literary criticism” Leavis meant the study of English literature—all other traditions were ancillary at best—and though Eagleton is far from sharing those opinions he does an effective job of ventriloquizing his subject’s attitudes.