Cannibalizing Literature

Literature, as well as bringing intellectual joy to those who are lucky enough to have achieved literacy, is an art form which passes on ideas, whether they be to mould the mind of a two year old against the concept on peeing directly into carpet or enlighten a young adult about latent philosophies.
George Will of Newsweek magazine, in a seemingly bitter and resentful attack against a poor, possibly innocent woman by the name of Iannone, assails a political left which he believes "emancipates literature from the burden of esthetic standards." Will thinks most universities look at literature and end up creating "collective amnesia and deculturation" because their technique sucks away the author's original purpose and replaces it with groups of critics who instead fight for the right to say that they know what the writing is actually supposed to mean.
Stephen Greenblatt, on the other hand, advocates what Will refers to as the "political decoding" of literature by way of creating groups which see politics as the predominating function of a piece of writing, although see no one function of that piece of writing. "Poets cannot soar when their feet are stuck in social cement." Greenblatt feels that one culture should not lord over a piece of writing, should not determine its meaning, lest other cultures be stamped out and left no room for inquiry.
Yet Greenblatt's theory is plagued by holes. True, a piece of writing may not have one definitive meaning or purpose. It's audience may be far-reaching in culture and thought. But Greenblatt fails to point out that even in his argument, he advocates the idea that the writer had a definitive purpose behind his writing. "We know that Shakespeare read Montaigne; one of the characters in The Tempest quotes from "Of Cannibals." Greenblatt spends half is article convincing the reader that Shakespeare had a concrete purpose, centered around imperialism's disgusting existence, in writing the The Tempest. He points out that commentary on mysoginism, racism, and anti-semitism can be found in Shakespeare's writing. But in saying so, he agrees with Will that Shakespeare had a concrete purpose within each writing. It is wrong to stifle creativity, to push aside any thought that another way of reading or acting something out may exist, but it is not wrong to say that Shakespeare attacked the evils of imperialism in one of his plays. If it is for that reason that Shakespeare wrote it, then it cannot be argued that he wrote it for that reason. Of course, the man is dead. We can't ask him. We'll never know.
But one can deduce that The Tempest made a specific assumption. That statement can and should be questioned. But it can't change the fact that, unless Shakespeare blindly stumbled upon to the coincidental, random shaping of those words and letters and meant nothing when writing the actual script, something drove Shakespeare's pen, and that something came from the mind of William Shakespeare, not a twentieth century college professor.