As you’ll have noticed, I forgot when I was talking about tomorrow’s class that I’d made the (very, very wise) decision at the beginning of the semester to cut the Lukacs essay from the syllabus. So it’s just Eagleton.
This, however, constitutes the opening of your on-blog discussion of Eagleton. What’s unexpected in the essay? What catches your attention? What gets under your skin?
3 responses so far ↓
zzzzz // 15 October 2008 at 7.58 am
A lot of this essay confused me, I’m not gonna lie. But I really liked his idea of tying literature to the political and social realm, because I think a lot of the time critics seems to make an attempt to separate literature and kind of place it into its own realm with its own important qualities. I definitely agree with his overall idea that what we used to call “literature” was indeed an ideological tactic to separate social groups. Off the top of my head I think of In the Cage and the main character who reads the “penny novels” (I think that’s what they’re called, I can’t really remember). As a clear member of the lower class, we are under the impression that what she reads is not entirely classified as “literature.” I wonder, though, if it is the nature of the books themselves or the class of the people who generally read them that place books into their respective classification. Did they exist as “literature” because the upper class read them, or did the upper class read them beause they were considered “literature?”
spotofbother // 15 October 2008 at 10.50 am
I think it’s interesting that Eagleton is always, in describing literary movements, quick to describe the social guilt they seem to always feel. According to Eagleton, the post-structuralists believed “writing turns in on itself in a profound act of narcissism, but always troubled and overshadowed by the social guilt of its own uselessness… Writing, or reading-as-writing, is the last uncolonized enclave in which the intellectual can play, savouring the sumptuousness of the signifier in heady disregard of whatever might be going on in the Elysee palace or the Renault factories” (122). Similarly, New Criticism “drove you less to oppose McCarthyism or further civil rights than to experience such pressures as merely partial, no doub harmoniously balanced somewhere else in the world by their complementary opposites. It was… a recipe for political inertia” (43). And “Richards’s quantifying , behaviourist model of the mind was in fact part of the social problem to which he was proposing a solution” (39). Also, “Scrutiny became a defensive elite which, like the Romantics, viewed itself as ‘central’ while being in fact peripheral” (31).
None of the movements we have seen through Eagleton succeeded in bringing about an all out social upheaval. But I wonder if that was the explicit goal of any of them. I think it’s easier to criticize a movement long-since passed, but I would be interested to see Eagleton defend his own beliefs as socially pragmatic.
mercurylanes // 20 October 2008 at 11.52 pm
Here’s what “The Rise of English†did and didn’t do to assuage my guilt about not having read most of the canonical works of English literature:
Part of what Eagleton’s irate leftist persona does so well to underscore is to make very clear where our current horizon of expectation stands: we live in a very different world than that of Richards, Eliot, etc., one in which there can’t be any absolutely “great†literature because text only works relative to its circumstance. Eagleton gives us evidence of circumstance, a kind of annotated and revised origin myth of what we know today as “English literature.” The “canon†had to come from somewhere, and based on its origins it tells a particular story about how texts get valued and devalued.
On the other hand, based on this new context, one is forced to revisit (or in my case visit for the first time) and say “Okay, so how DOES [x book] reflect the values of early twentieth century white male privilege?â€
Either way, you gotta read ‘em.