Reyes, Rochelle Ann P.

Terry Eagleton

Bachelor of Arts in English 4-2

Terry Eagleton is born in Salford, Lancashire, England. He was born on February 22,
1943. He is a British literary theorist, critic and public intellectual. He was influenced by Karl
Marx, F. R. Leavis, Raymund Williams, Louis Althusser and Herbert McCabe. Terry Eagleton is
one of the three Marxists in New Left Marxism. He is currently teaching English Literature at
the University of Lancaster, Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland, Galway and
English Literature at The University of Notre Dame as a visiting professor. He wrote over 40
books including Criticism and Ideology (1971) and his most important book in this point was
Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981). He applied feministic approach
together with Marxism and psychoanalytic theories in his Rape of Clarissa (1982).
In Criticism and Ideology, he argued that criticism should become a science and break its
ideological history. It should be focused on the relation of literature and ideology that generates
an effect of the real rather than saying it mirrors the history or the real events in the society. Texts
are not free from the use of ideology but it can be free from mirroring the reality because
ideologies are the system of belief or thoughts whether it is aesthetic, religious, and judicial. It
also used the concept of the author as the producer. An artist does not create but produce a work
from the history and ideology in the society. For Eagleton the possibility of certain distinct
literary genres is shaped by the forces and relations of the production of literary which is
determined by the forces and relations of the general mode of production. Criticisms goal is to
show the ideological forces that make up a text. While in his Walter Benjamin or Towards a
Revolutionary Criticism, he argues that Benjamins revolutionary criticism has not been given
accurate attention. It also displays an interest in feminism as well in his Rape of Clarissa. Rape
of Clarissa is his interpretation of Clarissa, the eighteenth-century novel, by Samuel Richardson.