Literary Theory: An Introduction Book

Eagleton deserves a lot of credit, because I can now say that I've put paid to a two hundred-plus page book on Literary Theory and never suffered a single dull moment. And while the author was fully engaged throughout'offering up energized summations and interpretations of the evolving schools of theory that developed out of the study of (English) literature and, subsequently and consequently, the structures of language itself, before launching polemical broadsides from the Marxist perch (with its material metaphysics) whence he declaims with brio'a surprising proportion of this book's pleasurable qualities come from the very subject being brought under explicatory lenses. Who'da thunk that something sheltered beneath the dullest of rubrics would inveigle, inflame, and incite this general reader to the point that I've ordered After Theory, Eagleton's two decade on follow-up? What's more, while I'll probably never make use of the systems herein at any point during a future review, they've settled themselves comfortably and solidly within the mnemonic recesses of my brain, and have already begun to work their memes when I review how I've structured various fictional works collecting electronic and airborne dust across a smattering of hard-drive platters and yellow legal pads.

It's a beguiling progression in a field once mocked by teachers of the classics and philology, mirroring the material world in its historical pathbreaking, which turns around a combination of explosive population and techno-industrial growth, broad cultural leveling, and spiritual-metaphysical implosion. From the Romantic attachment to an individual interpretation of the nebulously populated field of literature, wherein meaning was self-derived and -inhering, taken from a text fully in the possession of its author and timeless in its insistence upon deriving personally situated pleasures, things change drastically by the time we arrive in the seventies with post-structuralism in full operation, gleefully prying apart blocks of words in order to harvest the bounty of enchained potential meaning recrudescent between flickering signifier and untethered referent and scattering all claims of absolute knowledge to the four winds of metaphorical delusion. The elusive quality of truth, meaning, and other verities within the symbolically-riddled essence of human language is presented in all of its compelling modern journey; and the tendencies of the various critical epistemologies'Romanticism, Formalism, New Criticism, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, along with Psychoanalytical contributions'to ahistorical, ideological, and/or activist blinders is set against their driving forces at play within a world suffering waxing and waning degrees of optimism, pessimism, radicalism, and disillusionment.

Eagleton's goal is to show how selective, and ultimately ineffectual, critical theory is: with what constitutes Literature proving itself historically tendentious, the field either wallows in subjective tastes that defy analysis or engages in a cycle of division, inspection, and assignation of signifiers at the expense of what is being signified. While the early schools of critical theory were blind to the ideological memes and structure immanent within literary works, both expressive of'and dedicated towards maintaining'the Western Enlightenment-cum-liberal capitalist system that birthed and cherished it, the modern outgrowths have shown scant more awareness. It is not that theory's practitioners explicitly support the western liberal political memes embedded within the text, but rather that their systemic noodling renders them oblivious to their existence at the various levels of what they are examining, including that the vast quantity of material omitted from the designation of literature harbors much that would prove most beneficial, to individual and, more importantly, society as a whole, to being dissected, discoursed about, and brought into the public exchange of ideas. Literary theory needs perforce to rid itself of this literary constraint, that its theory can come out of the academic cloisters and reveal more of the ways in which so-called democratic citizens are distracted, disaffected, disparaged, distraught and disposable. As Eagleton determines it, all writing is political at its core and in its message, however subtly and unconsciously emplaced: so rather than penning or escaping into the lulling comforts of an imagined world, where existing exploitations and inequities are strained via story, why not resist and redirect those energies towards the actual political, that real and enduring change might be effected for living beings?

The author notes that a majority of readers do so for the pleasure the activity brings'while various defensive and escapist mechanisms may be an important part of the process, it is, in the end, the enjoyment sparked within by the magic of the word that has driven the consumption of books, especially in fiction. Keeping that in mind'and how the masses have thusly ever defied accommodation with the demands and expectations pressed upon them by Marxist intellectuals'I found Eagleton persuasive as regards his primary target, the academic environ where those well-placed to initiate and carry the debate have become isolated, drawn into often tedious and dry discussion between themselves about minutiae that serves of little import apart from its own exercise. His personal ideological ends aside, he has provided herein an erudite serving of food for thought.

I was bemused throughout by how much I could both distance myself from each theoretical system, by means of disagreement, while yet returning over and again to analyzing how aptly they measured the contents of literature relative to the historical flux in operation across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, the minute drilling down of the Post-Structural world, wherein there are no certainties and everything becomes relevant to a complex series of linkages and interpretations appears to me both symptomatic and causative of the frenzied, matricial information overload which has been burgeoning across the globe at breakneck speed. We have been sundered from our communalized society and made to stand as lone individuals: and now we find that all of the meanings that are so central to our self-determination are but another ephemeral element of our constituted beings. The only certainty we possess is that of a constantly evaporating certainty. In this nucleated rationalism that pierces all veils of the irrational mind'mental constructs, spiritual salves, subjective meaning'seeking ever more devolution no matter the bailiwick, I'm reminded of Spengler's enunciation of dead cultures, where the intellect, no longer guided by the strong arm of meta-culture, runs amok amidst its environs.