Terry Eagleton

I've always meant to read his study of Irish Culture, Heathcliff & the Great Hunger. Now that you've reminded me, I might just do it!

I found a couple of TE's theory books useful, but I really didn't get on with his novel 'Saints and Scholars'.

I think he's one of those people for whom Marxism filled up the place where Catholicism used to be, so he tends towards the dogmatic.

I don't think he's as witty as he imagines he is.

he knows bugger all abt pop culture, which doesn't stop him from pronouncing on it

pinefox says he wz a good teacher: this seems quite likely

He also went to the same school at Tony Wilson interestingly enough...

* - is there a market for Academicbitch?

I have proffered my experience of him before, on ilx and elsewhere; perhaps I should avoid doing so again, though it's hard to avoid. To repeat (probably) something I've (presumably) said before: he helped me to learn to think. There were and are, of course, other ways to learn, and other ways to think.

Having read him more than most, I can See His Limitations more clearly than most - but I can see them in, say, the way that I can see Jerry the Nipper's, or Chris Waddle's.

For legal reasons I would like to disassociate myself from the knobbing allegations. He does that thing of calling the reader 'she' though, which really gets on my tits.

The whole book is by far the closest TE has ever come to writing like George Steiner - deliberately, but also accidentally. (Hey, I'm on fire here.) In fact, if I were TE and reviewing it, I'd probably make great play re. the idea that it might all be a fiendish parody of Steiner, and not to be taken seriously at all.

What pedantry? If anything there's a dearth of it.

Illusions is not his best as even he would surely admit.

I recently tried reading Terry Eagleton's latest blockbuster, entitled something to do with dissidents or dissent. It is a collection of articles, including one about David Beckham. It was quite palatable, certainly easier than the tragedy one, and I finally got to see what everyone meant about his fabulous sense of humour, which had me in stiches in the aisles. I didn't read all of it though, because I had to take it back to the library.

I've also got one called 'Literary Theory' which I bought a few months ago. I don't know what came over me.

I am glad this thread has taken up its rightful place in Cafe Revive.

I have now finished Sweet Violence, having closely read every page. I'm afraid that it's one of his worst books, and certainly his most rambling and unstructured. That much cannot be said of Literary Theory, though that one is a somewhat different kind of animal.

Did you get my email about the Bowlie piece? Can you email me at freakytrigger at hotmail dot com ASAP please? Thankyou!!

I've always found Eagleton very readable but I've no idea if he's right or not btw.

Mr Eagleton that is, not the book (it's not out yet).

I hated Eagleton once upon a time, but this was very interesting.

I think that, given the opportunity to talk about a question like 'after theory', he should be a lot more incisive, original and surprising, and certainly not rehash things he has been saying for a decade or more.

I think a step towards doing this might be to acknowledge his own personal involvement in the historical moment that was 'theory', and to think about aspects (causes, effects, pros, cons) of that personal involvement.

Nugatory - long lost Womble.

motherfuck how could i ever have liked anything he wrote?

Nugaterry: brother of Nugatory.

I am up to 'Structuralism and Semiotics' now.

I think that perhaps 50-60% of this piece is OK - or better than the Guardian one. It goes a *little* way towards the historicization I had said I would like to see.

But the final complaints and demands seem to me somewhat misguided. One aspect of that is what will annoy many: the 'stereotyped / misleading / caricatured' version of PoMo and theory. Yes, OK - but there are other problems too, I think.

For instance: I do not see why it follows from the fact that 'Fundamentalism' is a threat that we should abandon 'Pragmatism'. One might say the opposite.

Nor do I really think that 'Fundamentalism' is the most obvious threat or problem around. It is strange that TE does, if he does.

---

My new book, After Theory, provoked one predictable reaction from the political right even before it hit the shops. What the title really signified, philosopher Roger Scruton helpfully suggested, was that contemporary cultural theory had all been a dreadful aberration, and we could now pick up the threads wherever it was we laid them down. One can see how things might look like this from the far right. After a nightmarish interlude in which people gullibly swallowed the notion that there is nothing in the world but language, that Jeffrey Archer is as good as Jane Austen, and that beer mats are as semiotically rich as Balzac, sanity has broken out once more. The whistle had finally been blown on this orgy of unreason, and those who had been bamboozled by it could now return shamefacedly to their John Locke, David Hume and Christopher Ricks. In this view, those such as myself who helped ferment this madness are now prodigal sons, repentant sinners, recovered theorists. TA now stands for Theorists Anonymous, not Territorial Army.

What we can return to, so some claim, is actually reading works of literature rather than simply theorising about them. Not that the opponents of theory are always close readers. About ten years ago, a bunch of them at Cambridge University voted down Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. I would be prepared to bet a large amount of money that a good many of these dons -who seek to inculcate habits of close analysis in their students - had not read a whole book by Derrida, or in some cases more than a few pages. Conversely, a great many literary theorists are tenaciously close readers: Walter Benjamin, Harold Bloom, Frederic Jameson, Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, Edward Said, Hel ne Cixous, Paul De Man and Hillis Miller are among the more obvious examples.

The response to my book by a few on the political left will, I suspect, be the opposite of Scruton's, accusing it of intellectual betrayal. Yet it begins by insisting that what is in effect at an end is not theory but Theory. Lower-case theory goes on all the time, even when scanning a menu or checking a telephone directory. Theory, by contrast, breaks out only sporadically, when there seems an urgent need for it. "Pure" or "high" cultural theory, from Theodor Adorno and Roland Barthes to Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva, believes in looking at things historically; and it must logically bring this historical perspective to bear on itself.

Cultural theory is not a timeless phenomenon. In its "high" form, it flourished -from about 1965 to 1980 -for two major reasons. First, it was a symptom of a deep-seated crisis in the humanities. The humanities, one might claim, have always acted as both ideology and utopia. If they have colluded with an oppressive civilisation, they have also been the custodians of values, which point beyond it. They have offered us seductive rationales for accepting the status quo, but also provided us with a powerful critique of it. In the 1960s, the utopianists lost the battle to the idealogists. The humanities were either to be sidelined or firmly harnessed to late-capitalist priorities.

Capitalist society tips its hat to "culture", but only as a lapsed Catholic might absent-mindedly cross himself when passing a church. The arts for a utilitarian social order are just like ethics and religion; they are there to define what you live by in theory, but you would not be so crashingly naive as to take them seriously in practice. Instead, you accept that there is a necessary gap between what you say and what you do. Values are one thing, facts another.

It was "theory" that resisted this philistinism. It has itself been accused of treating culture in a purely instrumental way, and the criticism is sometimes warranted. There is surely more to Twelfth Night than class and gender. Ironically, however, a lot of cultural theory insists that what is precious about culture is the fact that it does not have any very obvious exchange-value. It is thus the very pointlessness of culture that lends it a political point. While being pressed into the service of the present, it also anticipates a social order that would take Immanuel Kant's dictum seriously and treat men and women as ends in themselves.

The other reason why theory emerged was because the map of the humanities was being redrawn. The structure of knowledge we had inherited was no longer true to our experience. By the 1970s, much of the most fascinating work in the humanities was being done on the borderlines between subjects and in the crevices between traditional disciplines. Many of the most influential thinkers -Said, Susan Sontag, Raymond Williams, Jurgen Habermas, Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu -resisted any conventional label.

"Theory" was just a provisional name for the space you were left with when classical academic categories began to crumble. In this respect, the more traditional title for the theorist was the intellectual. And whatever academics were, they were by no means necessarily that. Theory sprang up and flourished in the period when the political left was still strong, and when there seemed a reasonable chance of wresting the humanities from the CEOs of the spirit. What today's champions of cultural theory need to acknowledge more candidly than they do is that that struggle had been lost by the late 1970s. What took the place of theory-as-critique was theory-as-postmodernism -a current of thought that at its most callow found utopia in the discos and shopping malls. The future was already here, and it was known as consumerism.

Over the 1980s and 1990s, students ceased to write theses on the Frankfurt school and wrote them on Friends instead. Theory survived but in more accommodating, apolitical, status-quo-friendly form. Culture had ceased to act as critique and had become a branch of commodity production. In fact, theory itself was now a flashily packaged product, a form of competitive cultural capital. History had ended, truth and totality were out, pleasure and pluralism were in, and grand narratives were for sad types with leather patches on their jacket elbows and Biros in their top pockets. Suddenly, everyone was working on vampires and sadomasochism.

But the obituaries issued for history proved premature. Osama bin Laden had evidently not been reading Francis Fukuyama. At the moment when western cultural theorists were growing more laid-back and pragmatic, the collapse of the twin towers was an ominous sign that grand narratives might be over in San Diego but not in Saudi Arabia. We may not think our civilisation forms a whole but al-Qaida does. And just as western philosophers were kicking away their own foundations, rejoicing in the arbitrary, ungrounded nature of their cultural values, fundamentalism was rearing its ugly head from Texas to Tikrit. Perhaps postmodernism, for all its cosmopolitan flavour, had proved a little parochial.

This, then, is where we find ourselves now. Our problem is to combat fundamentalism with something less brittle than postmodern relativism and scepticism. It is a question of being deep without being dogmatic. More particularly, it means that cultural theory must be ready to risk being labelled metaphysical, which in the eyes of some of its practitioners is only slightly less of a swearword than "elitist". It must strike out from the well-trodden paths of class, race and gender and look again at all those questions that it has shelved as embarrassingly large: questions of death, love, morality, nature, suffering, foundations, religion, biology and revolution.

This is a formidably demanding agenda, for which After Theory is a mere sketch. But the global political crisis under which we are living demands nothing less. And the conceptual resources to pursue this agenda are not lacking -as opposed to being unfashionable. There is a tradition of thought from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to Hegel and Karl Marx for which human virtue means the enjoyable realisation of our individual powers. Pace Kant (who believed just the opposite). If it doesn't feel good it is only dubiously virtuous. The question that engaged thinkers such as Marx is what kind of politics this ethic of wellbeing implies. What social institutions does it require today in order to flourish? And how is it to be universalised?

Socialism, like the Judaeo-Christian tradition, insists that such self-realisation has to be reciprocal. Only by finding our own fulfilment in becoming the means of another's wellbeing can this ethic be realised all round. The Judaeo-Christian name for this condition is love. It may be that by returning the so-called virtue tradition, and finding in Marxism an authentic reworking of this heritage under modern conditions, we can draw together issues of truth, justice, virtue, happiness and political transformation.

Like all the most interesting theoretical projects, however, this is not just a theoretical project. For without such transformation, we will fail to change the conditions that breed so-called terrorism, ploughing on with our provincial discourses of vampirism, sadomasochism and body-tattooing while the towers crumble around our heads. There is, in other words, something in it for us; and without this ingredient of enlightened self-interest, no political or intellectual enterprise is likely to survive for long.

(god this guy is a fukn switchback fraud)

Presumably the stuff that's already going on - Permanent Theory, a human condition - doesn't need reviving. That point is true, but trivial.

>>> His historicizing I don't find helpful -- it seems ironic that the capital-T Theorists he appears to think have outlived their historical moment were mostly encouraging the kind of small-t multiple theorising he seems to be calling for in the early sections of the article.

Not sure I understand this point - esp. as, like I say, small-t theorizing is a red herring here, it's just a human function like breathing (I think, and I think he thinks).

It seems odd if he IS saying that Williams / Habermas / Bourdieu are past it. (Yes, I know 2 are dead.)

>>> But TE continues to churn out History with a capital -- monolithic and uni-directional: 'Big Theory => Postmodernism => something new, I hope'.

I suppose this is right, You mean: many things happen, his narrative can't hold them? That's true enough, but I'm happy enough with general narratives too (so are you I expect).

>>> I also think he's wrong about what's happening in academia at the moment -- I know more people interested in fundamentalism than in vampires (although I know plenty of folk who are equally interested in both).

I think I agree. And I think that once you've started listening to people banging on about fundamentalism, you'll probably wish that more people were still talking about discos.

It is always easy to say 'Let's be more SERIOUS', until everyone starts actually doing it.

Like I say, I think his conclusions here are relatively mediocre. Why do we need to talk more about "death, love, morality, nature, suffering, foundations, religion, biology and revolution"? Maybe we should talk less about one or two of them than we already do. And more about Robert Palmer's 'She Makes My Day'.

I'm convinced.

jesus fuck its like he just read some "death of irony" article from spring 2002.

she is an awful woman, it is true

Oh Terry you hilarious japester you!
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/terry-eagleton-email-internet/

I have, however, hit on an unbeatable way of taking my revenge on the “Have the invoices arrived yet?” brigade. Whenever I sit on a train, I place a small banana on the table before me. If I find myself opposite someone who forces me to listen to his boring, brain-rotting conversation, I give a loud “brring brring.” Then I pick up the banana and conduct a deafening pseudo-dialogue of soul-killing dullness. If the person opposite protests that I’m sending him up, I ask him in affronted tones whether he has been listening in on my private conversation.

lol

I think that article displays all of the things I dislike about Terry Eagleton's writing. The parts that are supposed to be funny are not. The conceits he employs are crashing:

I do have a mobile phone, but it’s immobile. I never take it out of the house, for fear of triggering some ridiculous trend in which hordes of people march down the street bawling into these sinister little gadgets.

I think I mentioned on the Chomsky thread that I find him very boring to read or listen to, and in the same way I find Eagleton obnoxious. In both cases, of course, this is an aesthetic reaction and doesn't reflect on whatever point it is they might be making (and of course Eagleton's article about email there is a piece of fluff).

But I mean, there's a lot to be said about the very sudden universality of mobile phones and email. It's a social/technological phenomena that should be analysed. But that article, TE's attempt at doing so, is so clubbable, so jocular, so ... chuffy.

I have a pet theory that Eagleton belongs to the same lineage as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw - a particular kind of Anglophone socialism which insists on talking in an affable, avuncular way, a sort of crummy sensibility, inability to pick up on nuances. Crass. The sort of people who Flaubert called 'bourgeois', who themselves like to use the word 'bourgeois' a lot.

I suppose they distrust subtlety and discretion as elitist or something. But it's difficult to be more conservative, more stuffy and solid and sitting-down than:

Nowadays, however, protest is most definitely what my email virginity has become. I am living proof that all this frenetic, mostly vacuous, communication is quite superfluous. We all survived without it before it started, and I personally have survived without it ever since. If people really want to contact me, they write. If they can’t be bothered, or have forgotten how to do it, or imagine that writing disappeared with Norman Wisdom and drainpipe trousers, that’s their problem. Besides, email is surely just a passing fad. My own prediction is that it will be over by next Christmas and everyone will then revert to my own state of technological chastity.

I also remember him saying somewhere something like 'Up until the 1970s, lots of people thought that Marxism was a good idea. What has happened to these people? Have they been buried under a pile of toddlers?'

I'm aware that I haven't managed to engage with any of TE's ideas in this post.

Oh Terry you hilarious japester you!
Reminds me of the hilarious hijinks that ensued when Maya Rudolph Angelou pranked Cornell West on SNL.

TE's "ideas" amount to warmed-over Marxist lit crit IMO. He's at his absolute worst when going on about theology and religion, that is pretty much unreadable. See for example this review of The God Delusion:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
Eagleton and Dawkins deserve one another.

Terry Eagleton meet Harlan Ellison:

HE: I am a steadfastly 20th-century guy. I've always been pathologically au courant. Even today I can tell you the length of Justin Bieber's hair. But it has now reduced society to such a trivial, crippled form, that it is beyond my notice. I look at things like Twitter and Facebook, and "reality TV" – which is one of the great frauds of our time, an oxymoron like "giant shrimp" – and I look at it all, and I say, these people do not really know what the good life is. I look at the parched lives that so many people live, the desperation that underlies their every action, and I say, this has all been brought about by the electronic media. And I do not envy them. I do not wish to partake of it, and I am steadfastly in the 20th century. I do not own a handheld device. Mine is an old dial-up laptop computer, which I barely can use – barely. I still write on a manual typewriter. Not even an electronic typewriter, but a manual. My books keep coming out. I have over 100 books published now, and I've reached as close to posterity as a poor broken vessel such as I am entitled to reach

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/14/harlan-ellison-q-and-a-interview

old dudes are old

HE rate of production not a patch on the pants on that of his idol/anti-idol Isaac Asimov.

Problem is the assumption that everyone else apart from them really blindly loves their phones and computers and gadgetry, only wise old owls know about sunsets and sunrises and the taste of a well-prepared meal

Given that the publishing companies and printing firms and reviewing media they rely on for survival are all online I don't really buy this 'we survived without it and I continue to survive without it line'

Local Garda to thread!

"I remember when you made your own entertainment by running a stick down some railings or kicking a tin can. Now it's all "iPhone this, smartphone that" Gone to the dogs, it has"

would much rather read asimov than harlan ellison (or eagleton tbh).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8266-l00Ows

Fun for Mark S.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/03/terry-eagletons-materialism-treats-its-arguments-carelessly-piled-bricks

like peanut butter eagleton is bad and if you like him you are also bad

Crunchy Eagleton or smooth Eagleton?

How did we miss Terry Eagleton presents Jesus Christ, AKA "The Gospels"?

https://cdn-ed.versobooks.com/images/000012/834/The-Gospels-1050st-d8d763e1e4f1c2019a1d269f7d3eec1f.jpg

h/t to Owen Hatherley

am going to plug that I've written an introduction to William Morris' political writings for the @VersoBooks series that brought you 'Terry Eagleton Presents Jesus Christ' https://t.co/DVy1aXsaK6

— Owen Hatherley (@owenhatherley) June 30, 2020

better cover than eagleton deserves imo

not that i can decode half of it, is it referncing a famous painting?

and no, i will never end my war with him he is bad and you shd feel bad (if you disagree)

Same series...

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81KQq6ryuwL.jpg

the figures that puzzles me on terry's book is the small bearded xylophone player at the christ's feet, to his right (or left looking at him)

Yes, I noticed him!

Is it Judas totting up his small change?

nice to see a marc bolan cameo on the spine also, i guess he was attracted by the stars (very 70s pop TV)

According to Terry Eagleton’s new book, the Cambridge critic I.A. Richards, a skilled mountaineer, once “forced a bear in the Canadian Rockies to back off by urinating on it from a balcony.”

— Ryan Ruby (@_ryanruby_) September 6, 2022

is balcony a mountaineering term or was the bear in, like, verona?

Exit pursued by pissy bear.

Will give this a read later

For @thebafflermag i reviewed Terry Eagleton’s latest, Critical Revolutionaries, and tried to assess the legacy of mid-century criticism and the contemporary status of literary and cultural studies https://t.co/iKJfjq8LuH

— John Merrick (@johnpmerrick) August 25, 2022

tfw yr book is reviewed by the elephant man

lol!

also fvck the lazy attack on quiller couch lol (literally leavis's mentor, leavis being eagleton's mentor) and the guy who wrote "murder your darlings"

A friend of mine calls him "Terry Eagleton Who Should Fucking Go To Jail." Apparently female grad students are warned, as a matter of policy, not to be alone in a room with Prof. Eagleton.

― sue d'nim, Thursday, February 6, 2003

Surprised at how few follow-on comments this has prompted during this thread's long existence.

F.R. Leavis was not Terry Eagleton's mentor.

fair enough, i am really just paraphrasing merrick ("Yet at Cambridge he was also to encounter two of his early, and most formative, influences: the literary critic F. R. Leavis, whose last days at the university Eagleton experienced, and Raymond Williams, under whose supervision he completed his doctorate on the Victorian poet and writer Edward Carpenter") in order to push back against his too-casual dismissal of quiller-couch

you can perhaps spot the word i was tiptoeing inelegantly round :)

Yes, if anyone was it was Raymond Williams.

xp

heard that from before from another source so i believe it xps

I tried to read him a few times but found him impenetrable. I don't know any of these people either

This inelegantly tiptoed what?
This what tiptoed round?
This inelegantly what round?

thinking about the time Junior Eagleton blocked me for the "uncomradely" crime of pointing out he was posh & that doing fawnign recruitment for an NLR job that demanded fluency in english, german & italian (iirc) was not a great look, & wondering how he'd have coped w/ mike davis

— josie sparrow (@ofthesparrows) October 26, 2022

d'y'know i'd never considered a Leavisite element to Terry E's actual crit but i can see it, kind of

xp this is how to do it

My favourite Mike Davis story is still him unleashing his army of dangerous pets at the poshos in the NLR office because he was angry — RIP pic.twitter.com/IGfZlvu5xg

— Edward Edward (@lvkerlvker) October 26, 2022

perry and terry both have their own threads, why none for mike davis!?

I only got to know Davis through twitter

Looked again at TE's HOW TO READ A POEM (2007). Much of it is superb; remarkable that he could still do this at that point.

HOW TO READ A POEM (2007):

Like thatching or clog dancing, literary criticism seems to be something of a dying art.

HOW TO READ LITERATURE (2019):

Like clog dancing, the art of analysing works of literature is almost dead on its feet.

Terry Eagleton's clog dancing troupe has been in a sorry state for a while now

That is extremely incisive critical analysis from poster Conrad.

"ultimately you couldn't really understand these guys unless you'd taken showers with them when you were ten" is an all-time read

conrad? Conrad Knickerbocker?