Terry Eagleton

5 Key excerpts on "Terry Eagleton"

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  Apostolic and Prophetic

  Ecclesiological Perspectives

  • Thiessen(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cascade Books

    (Publisher)

  7

  A New Left Church? Terry Eagleton

  Introduction

  Born in Salford, England, in 1943, Terence Francis Eagleton is recognized as one of the most influential literary theorists working today. A third-generation Irish Catholic immigrant in Britain, Eagleton grew up in a working-class environment with strong Republican leanings. Unsurprisingly, his working-class background contributed to a sense of inferiority. However, in his nascent academic career, he worried initially about his roots receding from him, “but then I became rather stoical about it. It was foolish to believe this was a divide that could be simply crossed. I had no illusion that I could turn the clock back . . . But instead what I tried to do was write on behalf of my father’s people.”1

  Eagleton obtained his MA and PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge (1964–1969), a tutorial fellow at Wadham College, Oxford (1969–1989), and lecturer in critical theory at Linacre College (1989–92). Eagleton was appointed Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University (1992–2001), and John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester University (2001–2008). At present, he holds a Visiting Professorship at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and at other universities, including Lancaster, Yale, and the University of Notre Dame.

  His works—spanning subjects concerning literary theory, criticism, Marxism, colonialism, nationalism, and Ireland—are numerous, comprising not only academic publications, but also two plays, a novel, and a memoir.2

  While Eagleton established himself as a literary theorist, he has been interested in, and has also critically engaged with Christian theology and the church, especially his own Catholic Church. What might be almost forgotten are his earliest writings from the 1960s, which concern connections between faith, theology/ecclesiology, politics, and literature. Hitherto Eagleton has rarely featured as a discussion partner among theologians. However, with his latest publications, this is now changing. His earliest writings, including amongst others The New Left Church ,3 as well as his recent On Evil 4 and Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate 5 —a sharp, witty, polemical response to Richard Dawkins’ and Christopher Hitchens’ militant atheist agenda—invite us to pay new attention to his theological writings and views on Christian faith. In fact, Reason, Faith and Revolution , written over forty years after The New Left Church

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  Modern Criticism and Theory

  A Reader

  • Nigel Wood, David Lodge(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  48 Terry Eagleton

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315835488-48

  Introductory note

  Terry Eagleton (1943–) is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His career has taken in many visiting posts and a Professorship at Oxford University as well as Fellowships at Wadham, Linacre and St. Catherine’s colleges at Oxford and Jesus College, Cambridge.

  Eagleton has done more than most in bringing to public notice the practical, cultural and political consequences of Marx’s concepts of dialectical materialism and ideology. His earliest studies in this vein, Criticism and Ideology: a study in Marxist literary theory (1976), Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) and Walter Benjamin: towards a revolutionary ideology (1981), acknowledge a marked debt to Raymond Williams, although he was more obviously influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist thought. In both the thinking of Williams and Louis Althusser the emphasis frequently falls on the relative autonomy of cultural institutions, where their histories cannot immediately be related to, in Marx’s terms, the base of formal economic relations of value and labour. Within the superstructure (see Introductory note to Marx and Engels, this ed., p. 32), there were significant degrees of difference between simply ‘false’ ideas, deliberate fictions that subjugated individuals to the existing capitalistic social relations, and a rich system of representations, systematic and creative of perhaps alternative ways of perceiving the self in relation to the real basis of social organization. For Althusser, ‘ideological state apparatuses’ were indelibly stamped with an apparently libertarian array of images;

  In a class society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is settled to the profit of the ruling class. In a classless society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is lived to the profit of all men.

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  British Marxist Criticism

  • Victor N. Paananen(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  A contributing factor, especially within what was called the Yale School, in this dissection of literary values was a suspicion of ideology among intellectuals who had experienced Stalinism and fascism. The result has been skepticism about the entire critical enterprise and about meaning and coherence in texts. The most important counterforce to these developments has been the work of Raymond Williams, who remained the spokesperson for “historicist humanism,” dealt with a whole rather than a fragmented culture, studied the cultural institutions themselves, and operated from the outset from a Marxist understanding of language that others would discover only much later through Volosinov and Foucault. Eagleton was himself, he admits, sidetracked into “structuralist Marxism,” as Williams was not. Yet even Williams, despite the calls for broad community and shared activity implicit in his work, does not fully escape academic isolation—probably, in part, because of the failure of some of his early political hopes. Feminist criticism has, in fact, had more success in building bridges from the academy to the public sphere—not through the shared rationality that Habermas envisions but through a politics of the body. The role of the critic is to follow the feminist critics by including the political element and addressing real needs and interests: this is indeed the traditional role of the critic, filled by the bourgeois critics in the struggle against feudal absolutism and now part of the resistance to bourgeois rule. E89 “Editor’s Preface.” James H. Kavanagh, Emily Bronte. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985, pp. ix-xii. Eagleton applauds Kavanagh’s attention to social and sexual themes in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Kavanagh’s resulting insight that Nelly Dean’s narration provides a sober bourgeois realist account of the events that frustrates the anarchic sexual force of Heathcliff

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  Poetry and the Religious Imagination

  The Power of the Word

  • Francesca Bugliani Knox, David Lonsdale(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Literature and Theology, ‘far from dealing with matters that only overlap at the margin, will situate itself at the theoretical centre of both disciplines’ (iv).

  Given this confidence, it is surprising to read David Jasper’s assessment 20 years later:

  The study of literature and theology is alive and well, though it remains unsystematic and patchy. The texts of English literature and the doctrines of theology continue to enjoy creative conversations, though perhaps not much more than that, and the fundamental terms of the two fields of study remain unchanged. (Hass et al. 24)

  This description is somewhat low-key. Jasper certainly anticipates change, as the institutional and cultural influence of Christianity continues to recede. He follows Eagleton, therefore, in taking the decline of religiosity as an important variable. Briefly, Eagleton argued that the decreasing effectiveness of religion as ideological control was a concern for the Victorian ruling class, anxious about the loss of a ‘social cement’ (Eagleton, Literary Theory 20) which was, for Victorian Christianity at least, a pacifying influence, fostering meekness, self-sacrifice and the contemplative inner life. A substitute was needed, Eagleton explains, and sought in literature, with ‘English’ henceforth being constructed as a discipline. Matthew Arnold proposed a scheme of cultural enrichment of the middle classes, which would empower them in turn to shape and direct the working classes, thus averting social disaffection and anarchy. Behind such a project lies the recognition that literature has the potential to inherit the immense emotional and experiential power of religion, and to carry forward its ideological task of preserving the political and economic status quo.

  Variants on this theme of religion as a recognized force for ethical and social stability include Eliot and F.R. Leavis. In his 1935 essay, ‘Religion and Literature’, Eliot sought to balance the relative autonomy of literary and religious judgements; even so, his admonition that ‘literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint’ threw down a gauntlet for theorists through the subsequent 50 years (Selected Prose 97). Eliot’s championing of a European, royalist-classical Catholic tradition contrasted with Leavis’s articulation of a ‘Great Tradition’, which espoused the elemental ‘English’ energies of writers such as G.M. Hopkins and D.H. Lawrence. These involve very different cultural and existential commitments. Nevertheless, both are taken to task by Eagleton for not breaking free of Arnoldian anxieties about shoring up cultural defences against society at large, and therefore for being prescriptive and exclusivist in their canonical choices (Literary Theory

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  Marxism/Structuralism/Education (RLE Edu L)

  Theoretical Developments in the Sociology of Education

  • Madan Sarup(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3

  Literature, Ideology and Schooling

  In the previous chapter 1 discussed some of the issues in the debate between humanist marxism and structuralist marxism concerning the nature of history. In this chapter the debate will be continued, but the focus will be on literature. First there will be a review of the early work of Raymond Williams, a leading representative of the humanist approach. I will then outline one of the new perspectives that are being developed by Terry Eagleton and others, which adopts structuralist marxism as a method for studying literature. It is suggested that the categories Eagleton has proposed could usefully be applied to the study of education. Finally I will relate this debate to the place and function of literature in the educational apparatus.

  The Socialist Humanism of Raymond Williams

  The greatest figure in literary criticism and cultural studies in Britain today is undoubtedly Raymond Williams, whose achievement has been compared with that of Lukács, Goldmann or Benjamin. His work can be divided, broadly, into three phases; in what follows comment will be made on the first and second phases in order to bring out the humanistic characteristics of his work.

  Terry Eagleton tells us that when Williams came to writing in the 1950s, the criticism of the 1930s, compounded as it was of vulgar marxism, bourgeois empiricism, and romantic idealism, could yield him almost nothing.1 Like Christopher Caudwell, Williams was severely deprived of the theoretical materials from which to construct a socialist criticism. Intellectually isolated, what he did he did almost single-handedly.

  One of the main formative influences on his early development was F.R. Leavis’ journal Scrutiny .2 This journal contended that ‘human values’ were being brutally overridden by the development of contemporary capitalism. Driven back to the ‘artisanal’ images of a pre-capitalist past, the journal’s obsolescent and idealist solution was the organic community of a mythicized English past. Williams rejected Scrutiny’s position, because he realized it was fundamentally anti-democratic and élitist. At this time he also rejected marxism, because ‘there was, in this position, a polarization and abstraction of economic life on the one hand and culture on the other, which did not seem to me to correspond to the social experience of culture as others had lived it, and as one was trying to live it oneself.’3

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