In Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983, revised 1996), Eagleton surveys the history of theoretical approaches to literature, from its beginnings with Matthew Arnold, through formalism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, to post-structuralism. In the process, he demonstrates what is the thesis of the book: that theory is necessarily political. Theory is always presented as if it is unstained by point of view and is neutral, but in fact it is impossible to avoid having a political perspective. Peter Barry has said of the book that it "greatly contributed to the 'consolidation' of literary theory and helped to establish it firmly on the undergraduate curriculum".[16] Eagleton's approach to literary criticism is one firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition, though he has also incorporated techniques and ideas from more recent modes of thought as structuralism, Lacanian analysis and deconstruction. As his memoir The Gatekeeper recounts, Eagleton's Marxism has never been solely an academic pursuit. He was active in the International Socialists (along with Christopher Hitchens) and then the Workers' Socialist League whilst in Oxford. He has been a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.[17]
Since the advent of Marxism, literary critics have analyzed works in attempts to extract elements of the political philosophy. As critic Terry Eagleton asserts, the aim of "Marxist criticism...is to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and meanings. But it also means grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the product of a particular history." Marxist analysis of a literary work seeks to gauge the political motivations of the work, and determine the extent to which the work explores struggle between the classes. The novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is an excellent basis for Marxist analysis because of the overriding social and political implications brought forth by the characters. Get Help With Your EssayIf you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help!
terry eagleton marxism and literary criticism quotes
In it, Eagleton (who has held posts at Cornell, Yale, Duke, and Oxford Universities and now serves as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University) outlines for the reader a number of current critical frameworks, such as psychoanalysis. A staple text on university curricula, the text reflects Eagleton's Marxist approach to literary criticism, one that has made him and his work a focus of debate in the field of English literature.
Although it might be questionable whether Marxism is actually a ''scientific'' theory of hu- man societies and although we are not interested in political theory, it must be assumed that the literary theory and criticism which arose from Marx's ideas, represent powerful her- meneutic tools for the examination of literature in general and of Maggie in particular. The end justifies the means and if, through the employment of Marxist literary criticism, a deeper insight into Maggie's world can be gained, then the approach must have been justi- fied.
The traditional idea of culture as high art conceives of culture as something like the flower bed. While we might appreciate and value artifacts we deem beautiful, they are not essential to our primary physical needs. In a no-nonsense, colloquial view, culture is ornamental, secondary to if not a frivolous distraction from the real business of life. In classical aesthetics, culture is defined precisely by its uselessness and detachment from ordinary life. In psychology, Maslow's model of a "pyramid of needs" places culture in the upper reaches of the pyramid, possible only after the broad base of material needs are taken care of, which are primary to psychological well-being. In the classical Marxist view, culture forms part of the superstructure, tertiary to the economic base, which determines human life.[1] Accordingly, studies of culture, like literary or art criticism, have traditionally been considered refined pursuits, like gardening or horticulture, but not of primary importance to society, like politics, economics, or business.
Culture of course has another familiar sense: rather than the flowers of human experience, it encompasses a broad range of human experiences and products. Though abnegating its special status, this sense likewise plays off the agricultural root of culture, expanding the bed from a narrow plot to the various fields of human manufacture. Over the past few decades, this latter sense seems to have taken precedence in colloquial usage, in politics, and in criticism. We speak of proclivities within a society, such as "sports culture," "car culture," "hiphop culture," or "mall culture." In political discourse, culture describes the tenor of society, such as "the culture of complaint," "the culture of civility," or "the culture of fear," and societies are defined by their cultures, such as the "culture of Islam," "the culture of democracy," or "the culture of imperialism," which generate their politics. In criticism and theory, culture, whether indicating race, class, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, abledness, locality, or taste, determines human identity, which in turn designates political interest. In short, "culture" has shifted from ornament to essence, from secondary effect to primary cause, and from a matter of disinterested taste to a matter of political interest. Consequently, pursuits that study culture, like literary or cultural criticism, have claimed greater political importance to society.
Nearly fifty years ago, Raymond Williams charged criticism to understand the conjunction of "culture and society." Now it seems that culture is society, interchangeable as a synonym for social interests, groups, and bases. Williams also charged us to examine culture in its ordinary as well as extraordinary forms, and it seems that the field of literary criticism has followed this mandate, undergoing what Anthony Easthope described as a paradigm shift, the objects of study expanding from high literature to all culture. However, if there is a paradigm of contemporary criticism, it designates not only an expansion of the object of study but a conceptual inversion of base and superstructure, culture shifting from a subsidiary (if special) role to primary ground. Even a social theorist like Pierre Bourdieu, who persistently foregrounded the essential significance of class, conceived of class less as a matter of material means than of taste, disposition, and other cultural cues. In the trademark phrase from his classic work Distinction, it is "cultural capital" that generates class position. Culture has become the base from which other realms of human activity--psychological, political, economic--follow.
The reign of culture has had its share of dissent. Marxists have attacked the rush toward identity politics as a fracturing of any unified political program as well as a fall away from the ground of class, and liberals like Richard Rorty have upbraided left intellectuals for their absorption in cultural politics at the expense of bread and butter economic issues like health care and labor rights.[2] In criticism, it appears that the field has absorbed Williams's lesson and moved, as Easthope succinctly put it, from literary into cultural studies, but not everyone has been satisfied with getting what they might once have wished for.
Terry Eagleton and Francis Mulhern, probably the two most prominent inheritors of Williams's mantle, have tried to correct the excesses of the reign of culture. Their books, Mulhern's Culture/Metaculture (2000) and Eagleton's The Idea of Culture (2000), take a middle road, acknowledging the significance of culture but quelling what they see as its present overinflation. I deal with them at length here because the books have been influential, published to considerable attention, including a long running debate in New Left Review; they continue the legacy of Williams, and before him of Leavis, as standard-bearers of British cultural criticism; they represent the residual bearing of the New Left; and they each hold positions as leading Marxist literary intellectuals in Britain (Mulhern has been a New Left Review mainstay and chief surveyor of modern British criticism, notably in The Moment of "Scrutiny" (1979), and Eagleton was Williams's prize student and is the most prolific and prominent expositor of Marxist literary theory). The corrective stance of both books is their strength and their weakness: the strength that they disabuse some of the overwrought or misguided claims of current criticism, the weakness that they do not propose a major new vision of the study of culture. Both end, in fact, with calls for modesty.
Mulhern's own project does not escape the metacultural problematic, especially in its focus on a "discursive formation." Though rhetorically buttressed with the materialist-sounding "formation," his history is almost entirely set within the realm of cultural discourse, and its political intervention occurs there. The field of reference of Culture/Metaculture is not the material base of society but literary and critical history. Such a history has some explanatory value and might hold a certain autonomy from larger social formations, but it is not the kind of history that traces the material institutions of criticism, such as the changes in publishing, the position of men and women of letters, the massive growth of the university, and the migration of those from the non-European world during decolonization, that formed contemporary cultural studies during the post-World War II epoch. It is not the kind of institutional history that he marshals in The Moment of "Scrutiny" for the interregnum between the great wars. In dwelling on a "morphology" of cultural criticism, Mulhern can only make a further metacultural claim, the check of modesty; he intervenes in the culture of criticism moreso than discerning the social history that conjoins with the culture of criticism.
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