Terry Eagleton
1) His Biography:
British philosopher Terry Eagleton was born on February 22, 1943, in Salford, England. At the age of 21, Eagleton graduated with a doctorate from Trinity College, Cambridge. He is currently a John Rylands Fellow and professor of cultural theory at the University of Manchester. Raymond Williams, a Marxist literary critic, taught Eagleton. He started out by reading books from the 19th and 20th centuries. He then advanced to Williams-inspired Marxist literary theory. Eagleton most recently combined cultural studies with more conventional literary theory. His most well-known book, “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, follows the development of modern textual analysis from the Romantics of the 19th century to the postmodernists of recent decades. Eagleton is not hesitant to criticise deconstructivism and other popular schools of thought, even though his neo-Marxist convictions occasionally affect his analysis. In his most recent book, “After Theory”, Eagleton persuasively criticises contemporary literary and cultural theory and what he perceives as their mutilation. Nevertheless, he does not come to the conclusion that the interdisciplinary study of literature and culture is conceptually without merit; rather, Eagleton makes the case (and provides evidence) that such a fusion is successful at tackling a wide range of important issues.
2) Main Works:
Marxism and Literary Criticism:
Is Marx still relevant today? Why should what he wrote concern us? What impact might it have on the literature we read? One of our generation’s most prominent critics, Terry Eagleton, offers several solutions in this incredibly lucid and readable study. It is without a doubt the most significant work on literary criticism to come from the tradition of Marxist philosophy and social theory since the nineteenth century. It is clear-cut and simple.
Ideology: An Introduction:
Ideology is defined in a variety of ways by Terry Eagleton, who also examines the tortuous development of the idea from the Enlightenment to postmodernism. Key Marxist theorists, as well as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and other post-structuralists, are all discussed in this book with clarity. This crucial essay, written by one of our most significant contemporary critics, clarifies a notoriously muddled topic and has been updated in light of recent theoretical discussions.
Saint Oscar:
Saint Oscar was developed when it toured Ireland during the height of the Troubles and was inspired by Eagleton’s surprise that his own Oxford students did not appear to recognise that Wilde was Irish. It combines sexual, national, and class politics with an irresistible sense of humour.
The Gatekeeper: A Memoir:
In a memoir, our hero weaves together personal narrative with moral, political, and cultural views. Thoughts about the existence of God, evil, suffering, death, and tragedy are woven together with amusing or touching scenes from the author’s life, including his strange experiences as a young altar server in a convent of enclosed nuns, his precarious career as one of the few working-class students among a group of public school boys in Cambridge in the 1960s, and his unsuccessful attempt at aseminary life.
After Theory:
The pinnacle of cultural theory, which spanned a 15-year period from 1965 to 1980, is long gone. We now live in its aftermath, in a time that has moved past philosophers like Derrida, Althusser, and Barthes while yet becoming richer in their ideas. What type of innovative, original thinking is required in this new age? Eagleton comes to the conclusion that cultural theory needs to think ambitiously again—not to give the West its legitimacy, but rather to attempt to make sense of the vast narratives in which it is currently entangled.
3) Main Themes in his Writings:
Subjectivity:
The main theme of Eagleton’s Literary Theory is subjectivity, as well as its inevitable extinction. Eagleton attempts to define literature, but he constantly runs against subjectivity. Eagleton consistently demonstrates how subjectivity is the driving force behind literature, from the romantics’ urge for aggressive self-expression to the post-structuralists’ persistent support for the democratisation of perspective. There is an unwritten agreement of judgement and approbation between the reader and the writer. The book becomes literature if each individual reader agrees, but if they disagree, the definition remains elusive. In the end, Eagleton comes to the conclusion that literature cannot be defined since it exists in the reader’s subjective viewpoint.
Deconstruction:
Eagleton emphasises this notion of deconstruction in his analysis of post-structuralism. This involves dissecting theories and presumptions to determine their fabrication. Following postmodern theory, deconstruction has taken on a bit of a cliche in writing, where it is perceived as a preference for the ironic and reflexive. Literature attracts attention to itself as a work of writing because it challenges the status quo. Because the reader’s comprehension and critical engagement with the text depend on this, it further complicates the notion of literature.
Language:
Eagleton frequently reduces literature to a linguistic process. Language encompasses aspects of art, criticism, and form in addition to those that are merely used for communication. There is a special appeal to the permanent in written language. Everything that has been written is in a position to hold authority since it has the ability to outlive its author. Eagleton explores language as the source of literature in a reductionist vein, but he further muddies the waters by bringing subjectivity back into the conversation.
After Theory:
After Theory (2003) was written two decades after the great age of High Theory – the cultural theory of Foucault, the postmodernists, Derrida, et al. In retrospect, Eagleton assesses its successes and failures and suggests new routes that should be followed. He views the broadening of the topics under study (to include gender, sexuality, popular culture, post-colonialism, etc.) and the extensive self-reflective critique of conventional presumptions as two of Theory’s greatest accomplishments.
However, in Eagleton’s opinion, there were also a number of grave errors. For example: the attack on the normative and the insistence on the relative nature of truth renders us unable to critique oppression; the rejection of objectivity and of all forms of essentialism bespeak an unrecognised idealism, or at least a blindness to our human materiality, which is ultimately a result of an unconscious fear of death; and cultural studies has mistakenly avoided considering ethics. Eagleton proposes new directions for cultural studies to pursue, including virtue and politics and how these might be fulfilled.
After Theory elaborates on this ethically related political element that arises from the fact that people are dependent on others and require others to survive, with their freedom being constrained by the universal truth of death.
Dawkins, Hitchens and the New Atheism:
Eagleton has grown to be an outspoken opponent of the so-called New Atheism. He provided a review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins in the London Review of Books in October 2006. Eagleton starts by challenging Dawkins’ approach and comprehension, saying, “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology”. Eagleton continues, “Nor does [Dawkins] understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us”. Finally, he suggests that Dawkins has been using organised religion as a type of rhetorical target rather than actually opposing organised religion.
4) Eagleton as a Literary Critic:
Eagleton bases his thorough criticism of deconstruction on a Marxist concept of “ideology”, which he defines as a “set . . . of values, representations and beliefs which, realized in certain material apparatuses . . . guarantee those misperceptions of the ‘real’ which contribute to the reproduction of the dominant social relations” (Eagleton). From Eagleton’s comments, we can deduce that for Marxism, the denigration of ideology implies an assault on identity, and on all the “identities” that make up distorted reality and are presented as eternal or natural realities.
These identities must be reduced to the economic and social relations that make them up. Eagleton admits the intricate relationship between history and ideology, but the point is that for Marxism, this attack must be based on some conception of identity and reality (such as economic ties). Marx and Hegel both believed that identity implied difference. But since one is an integral part of the other, difference in turn assumes identity.
Deconstruction, however, elevates “difference” to a transcendent level by hypostatizing it on only one side. The core of all oppositional conceptions, according to Derrida, is “the movement of difference, as that which produces different things . . . is the common root of all . . . oppositional concepts”. Trace, dissemination, spacing, alterity, and supplement are all metaphors for “difference”, which Derrida admits is founded on the Hegelian concept of sublation, the basis of which is identity-in-difference.
But what does it mean to claim that all oppositions, regardless of their content, share difference as their “common root”? The concept of “difference”, according to Hegel and Marx, is never universal and is always historically unique. This concept encompasses both of Derrida’s differing and deferring elements. Distinct oppositions have very different ideological, social, and economic fundamental grounds. Eagleton writes in his essay on Adorno: “Pure difference . . . is as blank . . . as pure identity” since Derrida reduces all historical complexity and variation into one disinterested and even mystical cause: “the movement of difference”.
In his essay on Adorno, Eagleton makes the argument that not all forms of identification or unity are equally terroristic, and that poststructuralism causes an “indiscriminate conflation” of various systems of oppression, power, and the law. He emphasises that any successful opposition to a specific political order requires cohesion, solidarity, and at the very least, a feeling of temporary identity. The idea is that Marxist critiques of ideology and identity gain their force from being part of a larger framework that is constrained by the necessity of their connection to a system of exchange.
Eagleton believes that Derrida’s insights, despite their apparent antagonism to established orthodoxies, only have a contingently subversive ability since they completely dispense with “identity” and only assert a coherence of the opposite: they cannot affirm anything to replace the order they “subvert”. Eagleton notes that the “dispersal” of the subject by deconstruction, which is also a politically crippling act, is “purely textual” and that “the infrastructure . . . for deconstruction is not de(con)structible” (Eagleton). Derrida acknowledges that his ideas effectively stop the Hegelian dialectic at its “difference” phase since they abstract it, strip it of its historical context, and use it as a transcendental principle. Deconstruction, according to Eagleton, “fails to comprehend class dialectics and turns instead to difference, that familiar ideological motif of the petty bourgeoisie” (Eagleton).
Eagleton therefore considers deconstruction to be essentially ideological. It effectively “colludes with the liberal humanism it seeks to embarrass” (Eagleton) like much of poststructuralism. Eagleton maintains that deconstruction reproduces typical bourgeois liberal themes (Locke and Hume did, after all, criticise the concepts of “identity” and “substance”). Once more, Eagleton notes that many of the concepts of deconstruction are already foreshadowed and elaborated in Marxist writers like Benjamin, Macherey, and Adorno, where the political content is infused into the empty shell of deconstructive “difference”. Deconstruction is also unaware of the factors that have shaped its own aporia historically because its insights are disconnected from any supporting infrastructure.
Eagleton acknowledges that deconstruction may be useful. However, he is also aware that Marxism’s dialectical nature already has this potential. The remorseless stress on “difference” as a foundation for criticising literary and philosophical texts is unique to Derrida and his adherents. Regarding the “negative”, Eagleton says, “only a powerless petty-bourgeois intelligentsia would raise it to the solemn dignity of a philosophy”. According to Eagleton, the writings of Hegel and Marx already contain the foundations of Derrida’s ideas within the context of a far larger historically self-conscious perspective.
Eagleton actually makes the case in his most recent book, After Theory, that we need to revert to a “simple realism” in some ways. He cautions that “If cultural theory is to engage with an ambitious global history, it must have answerable resources of its own, equal in depth and scope to the situation it confronts. It cannot afford simply to keep on recounting the same narratives of class, race and gender, indispensable as these topics are” (Eagleton).
5) Eagleton as a Marxist:
Eagleton began studying literature in the 19th and 20th centuries, eventually conforming to the strict academic Marxism of the 1970s. He was greatly affected by Louis Althusser’s theories of ideology, Pierre Macherey, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and psychoanalysis. In the style of Althusser, he made an attack in the New Left Review on the affiliation of his own tutor Williams with the Marxist tradition. In language, according to Eagleton, “shared definitions and regularities of grammar both reflect and help to constitute, a well-ordered political state”. He sees the main challenge as illuminating the connection between an ideology, like Marxism, and literature.
In his book Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes, Terry Eagleton published a Marxist analysis of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. He contends in Criticism and Ideology (1976) that a literary piece produces ideology rather than just expressing it. He does not always mean political or Marxist ideology when he uses the word “ideology”, but rather the entire systems and theories of representation that would go into the overall picture of a person’s experiences. He also looks at several ideologies outside of the book and a text’s specific ideology. From the Romantics of the nineteenth century through the postmodernists of the latter twentieth century, Literary Theory: An Introduction recounts the development of the study of texts.
Eagleton’s thinking is still very much a part of the Marxist tradition, but he has also written critiques of much more contemporary schools of thought including structuralism, lacanian analysis, and deconstruction. He gives a history and analysis of the concept of “the aesthetic” in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, showing the many ideological perversions and distortions of the term. Eagleton believes that the aesthetic, which was initially expressed in terms of freedom and pleasure and therefore had an “emancipatory” quality for humanity, has frequently been appropriated by the political right in order to symbolise the core of a reactionary ideology, which operates most effectively when it appears to be working ineffectively.
His 2003 book After Theory offers a critique of contemporary cultural and literary theory and what Eagleton sees as their mutilation. However, he does not come to the conclusion that theory, an interdisciplinary study of literature and culture, is without value. In fact, Eagleton contends that such a fusion actually helps to broaden the scope of important subjects that can be studied in relation to culture. Instead, he criticises “relativism” or the rejection of absolutes by theorists and postmodernism. While recognising that these possibilities are already present in Marxism’s dialectical nature, he admits that Derridean deconstruction offers political alternatives.
