Terry Eagleton

Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others

Playwright, literary theorist, fine analyst of the works of Shakespeare, the Brontes, Swift and Joyce, scourge of postmodernism, autobiographer...Terry Eagletons achievements are many and his combative intelligence widely admired and respected. His skill as a reviewer is particularly notable: never content merely to assess the ideas of a writer and the theses of a book, Eagleton, in his inimitable and often wickedly funny style, always paints a vivid theoretical and political fresco as the background to his engagement with the texts. In this collection of more than a decade of such bracing criticism, Eagleton comes face to face with Stanley Fish, Gayatri Spivak, Slavoj Zizek, Edward Said, and even David Beckham. All are subjected to his pugnacious wit, scathing critical pen, and brilliant literary investigations.

Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory

A resurgence of interest in the materialist aesthetics of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht has helped to free Marxist criticism from the neo-Hegelian forms within which it has long been imprisoned. Yet the central category of those materialist aesthetics—the ‘author as producer’—remains a transitional concept, potently demystificatory but politically indeterminate. And crucial though the analysis of the relations between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ within art itself clearly is, its historical explanatory power is not yet fully evident. The moment of Brecht, for example, is not easily translatable to English literary culture. Donnes Songs and Sonnets and George Herberts The Temple belong to different modes of literary production, but inhabit alternative areas of the same ideological formation; Defoe and Fielding practise the same mode of literary production, but it is their ideological antagonism which claims our attention. Henry Esmond was the only novel of Thackerary to be published complete, rather than in monthly serialized parts; but though this difference of productive mode undoubtedly impresses itself on the novels form, it leaves the ‘Thackerayan ideology’ essentially intact. No one expects modes of literary production and literary ‘superstructures’ to form a symmetrical relationship, dancing a harmonious minuet hand-in-hand throughout history; yet even if we allow for disjunction and uneven development, it seems true that the ‘author as producer’ concept is one which must, as it were, lie dormant over certain spans of literary history. The aesthetic redefinition of fiction as ‘organic form’ which develops in late nineteenth-century England, to discover its major ideologue in Henry James, is doubtless related to those shifts in literary production (from serialization and the ‘three-decker’ novel to the single volume) determined by the economic demands of the monopolist private lending libraries; yet it is not clear how such material mutations become an active element in the reconstruction of fictional ideologies.

God, the Universe, Art, and Communism

The world is divided among foundationalists, antifoundation alists, hybrids of the two such as foundherentists,1 those who have no definite view on the question, and those who have never even heard of it. I want to argue in this essay that these do not, in fact, exhaust all the possibilities. I also want to claim that what one might call unfoundedness is in a certain sense a project still to be accomplished rather than a given. To hold that there are some beliefs which are justifiable indepen dently of the support of other beliefs is to be an epistemological foundationalist, and these days to be egregiously out of fashion. There is a coherentist alternative to this case?the view that a belief is justified if it coheres with beliefs which in turn cohere with others?though conventionalism is an antifoundationalist option rather more in vogue with postmodern thought. There is also the foundherentist case, which holds rather plausibly that some beliefs may be partly founded and partly supported by others. But it is also possible to be an ontological foundationalist, which in a broad sense means believing that there is some basic stuff or furniture to the world, and (in the narrower, more historical sense in which I shall be using the phrase here) claiming that there is something?God, Geist, Mind, Reason, Will, power, economic production, or some other so-called transcendental signified?on which the whole of our activity rests. And this ontological substratum is not itself capable of being reduced to any other reality. This kind of foundationalism is close to a belief in grand narratives, though there is no reason why the thing which supports everything else should be a story. The turtle who holds up the elephant who holds up the world is not a narrative. There is a third kind of foundationalism?rational foundationalism? which holds that our arguments must be supported by reasons, and which is sometimes rather negligently thrown out with the other two sorts. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that epistemological and ontological foundationalism do not necessarily go hand in hand. One could hold, for example, that there is an ontological foundation to human affairs, but that one cannot establish this other than by a network of mutually

Ideology: An Introduction

In the modern world, ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as a concept. In a book designed both for newcomers to the topic and for those already familiar with the debates, Terry Eagleton unravels the many different meanings of ideology, and charts the history of the concept from the Enlightenment to postmodernism. As well as clarifying a confused topic, this new edition of a now classic work is fully updated in the light of current theoretical debates.

The Ideology of the Aesthetic

Introduction. 1. Free Particulars. 2. The Law of the Heart: Shaftesbury, Hume, Burke. 3. The Kantian Imaginary. 4. Schiller and Hegemony. 5. The World as Artefact: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. 6. The Death of Desire: Arthur Schopenhauer. 7. Absolutte Ironies: Sren Kierkegaard. 8. The Marxist Sublime. 9. True Illusions: Friedrich Nietzshe. 10. The Name of the Father: Sigmund Freud. 11. The Politics of Being: Martin Heidegger. 12. The Marxist Rabbi: Walter Benjamin. 13. Art After Auschwitz: Theodor Adorno. 14. From the Polis to Postmodernism. Index.

A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

Preface to the Fifth Edition. Introduction. 1. New Criticism, moral formalism and F. R. Leavis 2. Russian formalism and the Bakhtin school 3. Reader-oriented theories 4. Structuralist theories 5. Marxist theories 6. Feminist theories 7. Poststructuralist theories 8. Postmodernist theories 9. Postcolonialist theories 10. Gay, lesbian and queer theories Conclusion: Post-Theory. Appendix 1: Recommended glossaries of theoretical and critical terms and concepts. Appendix 2: Literary, critical and cultural theory journals. Index

Literary Theory: An Introduction.

This classic work is designed to cover all of the major movements in literary studies during this century. Noted for its clear, engaging style and unpretentious treatment, Literary Theory has become the introduction of choice for anyone interested in learning about the world of contemporary literary thought. The second edition contains a major new survey chapter that addresses developments in cultural theory since the books original publication in 1983, including feminist theory, postmodernism, and poststructuralism.