'Literary Theory: An Introduction' by Terry Eagleton

It took me forever to read this, but mainly because I was taking fairly
detailed notes; it’s not too tricky a read really. I took notes because I knew
I’d forget so much of it straight away, but I’d like some of it to stick, or at
least be ready to hand for when I forget. It was a good grounding for
someone like me whose English Literature study stopped at sixteen.

Introduction: What is Literature

2-5 The Formalists, Russia, 1910s. “Lit language is a set of deviations

from a norm … a ‘special’ kind of language, in contrast to the ‘ordinary’
language we commonly use.” Ordinary lang is different for different
classes, regions, ages, etc. Lit lang is an assemblage of devices (sound,
rhythm, narrative techniques, etc) and the lit content is merely present as
the reason to use these in a particular way.

6-7 However, it’s possible to read anything as literature, giving the text a
more general significance beyond its pragmatic purpose (reading it “non-
pragmatically”). So whether something is lit depends on how one reads it.
Lit is a “functional rather than ontological” term; “it tells us about what
we do, not about the fixed being of things.”

8-9 Lit is often what we think of as good. As this is a value judgement

there can be no objective category of writing that is literature; it’s
whatever we say it is.

10-14 But what we say it is is shaped by inescapable social ideologies.

Our value judgements “refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to
the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain
power over others.”

1. The Rise of English

15-16 During 18C, and by the Romantic period (19C), lit began to refer
only to imaginitive works.

17 Utilitarianism and early industrial capitalism are dominant in England.

State reacts to working class protests with “brutal political
repressiveness”. The literary work is seen as spontaneous and creative,
unlike society, and ‘poetry’ as an idea has political force.
18 But the creative artist and his ideals were isolated from society, and it
was only at the time of William Morris “that the gap between poetic
vision and political practice was significantly narrowed”.

18 Art/lit past and present began to be seen as an unchanging object, the

‘aesthetic’, ‘art’, no purpose but an end in itself above ordinary life.

19 The Symbol was at the centre of aesthetic theory at turn of 18C.

Conflicts in ordinary life were resolved within it, away from the middle-
class’s crass empiricism. It was irrational and couldn’t be explained —
you saw it or you didn’t — and it brought together the concrete and
universal, motion and stillness. [Examples of what this means would have
been good.]

21 By mid-Victorian period religion was ceasing to be the unifying and

pacifying form it had been. Eng lit was seen as something that could
“heal the State”. Matthew Arnold saw the middle class as harsh and
unintelligent and unable to lead and educate the working class in order to
prevent anarchy. They needed to be shown “the best culture of their
nation”.

22-4 Lit could impart universal ideals, putting its readers’ “petty”
concerns in perspective, and let them experience lives they couldn’t
afford. Arnold, Henry James and FR Leavis are exponents of the idea that
lit is an imparter of morality — or “is moral ideology for the modern
age”.

24-26 Eng lit was seen as feminine and an amatuerish subject Oxbridge
tried to avoid, but also a way of promoting English values in an imperial
age. WW I created a “spiritual hungering” and Eng lit provided the
answer.

26-27 Eng lit was transformed at Cambridge after WW I under FR

Leavis, QR Leavis and IA Richards, as the offspring of the provincial
petty bourgeoisie entered universities for the first time. Leavises
launched Scrutiny in 1932 and Eng lit became the important subject and
established how it is discussed today.

29-30 Scrutiny was “the focus of a moral and cultural crusade”. But it
didn’t seek to change (apart from through education) mechanized society
and its withered culture, just to withstand it. Closely reading lit would not
turn Eng into an organic and moral country. They disapproved of those
who didn’t have their knowledge. But if lit made you better how, after
WW II, to explain away educated Nazis? Scrutiny became an isolated
elite.

31-2 “Organic societies are just convenient myths for belabouring the
mechanized life of modern industrial capitalism.” The organic society
lived on in good lit for the Leavisites, “rich, complex, sensuous and
particular”. “Dramatically concrete” writers like Donne and Hopkins
manifested the essence of Englishness unlike the “latinate or verbally
disembodied” Milton and Shelley.

33 In 1915 TS Eliot came to London from St Louis and

began to carry out a wholesale salvage and demolition job

on [England’s] literary traditions. The Metaphysical poets and Jacobean
dramatists were suddenly upgraded; Milton and the Romantics were
rudely toppled; selected European products, including the French
Symbolists, were imported.

He thought Eng lit was on the right track in early 17C but “language
drifted loose from experience” resulting in the “literary disaster” of
Milton.

34 Liberalism, Romanticism, protestantism, economic individualism were

perverted dogmas and a right-wing authoritarianism was Eliot’s solution.
Literary works were only acceptable if they were part of the Tradition, or
the “European mind”, which was a largely arbitrary definition.

35 “Poetry was not to engage the reader’s mind: it did not really matter
what it actually meant.” “A language closely wedded to experience.”
Meaning was just to distract the reader while the poem worked on him
“in more physical and unconcsious ways”. Maybe there are deep roots
that poetry can reach, going beyond history and the crisis of European
society.

36 Eliot’s ideas about the need for language to become more primal was
shared by Ezra Pound, TE Hulme and the Imagist movement. Middle
class liberalism was finished — like Eliot, they were more right wing.

37-8 Leavis is associated with “practical criticism” (assessing the

qualities of passages and ignoring historical context) and “close reading”.

38-40 Cambridge critic IA Richards was a major link between Leavis and
the American New Criticism. He thought that modern science was the
model of true knowledge [unlike Leavis’s technophobia] but that poetry
was needed to balance the human psyche, something religion could no
longer do.

40-42 New Criticism, 1930s-50s: Eliot, Richards, maybe Leavis and

Empson, with American movement of John Crowe Ransom, WK
Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Monroe Beardsley and RP
Blackmur. Roots in a US South that was being industrialised. A poem
was internally coherent but not cut off from reality; reality was somehow
included within it making the poem a self-sufficient object in itself. New
Critics broke with the Great Man theory (works are ways to access the
author’s soul): “the poem meant what it meant, regardless of the poet’s
intentions or the subjective feelings the reader derived from it”.

42-43 New Critical methods offered a method of dissecting poetry. These

critical instruments were a way of competing with hard sciences on their
own terms and by 1940s and 1950s New Criticism was part of the
Establishment, perfectly natural.

44-46 Empson seems like a New Critic because of his analysis and
unravelling of meaning but he has an old-fashioned liberal
rationalism. Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Some Versions of
Pastoral (1935), The Structure of Complex Words (1951), Milton’s
God (1961). He treats poetry as something that can be paraphrased, and
takes into account what the author probably meant. The reader brings
social context and assumptions to the work.

2. Phenomenology, Heremeneutics and Reception Theory

47-49 German philosopher Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European

Sciences (1935). Rejected the “natural attitude” that we reliably know
about objects in the world. We only regard things as “intended” by
consciousness and we must “put in brackets” anything beyond our
immediate experience. The “phenomenological reduction”. The
phenomena in our minds are a system of universal essences, not just the
experience of something, an “eidetic” abstraction. Attempts to lay bare
the structure of consciousness and of phenomena, it’s neither empiricism
or “psychologism”.

50 “The subject was to be seen as the source and origin of all meaning”
and was not part of the world and its history and society because these
flowed from him.
51 Phenomenological criticism ignores a text’s historical context. One
can only know the author’s mind from what is manifested in the work
itself.

52 “A wholly uncritical, non-evaluative mode of analysis … a kind of

pure distilliation of the blind spots, prejudices and limitations of modern
criticism.” “For Husserl … meaning is something which pre-dates
language: language is no more than a secondary activity which gives
names to meanings I somehow already possess.”

52-53 This goes against the “linguistic revolution” of 20C which

recognises that meaning is dependent on language and [I think] the
language’s society.

53-54 For Husserl man stamps his image on the world. His pupil
Heidegger moves on from this: the world is not “out there”, we are bound
up in it. Understanding is not an “act I perform, but part of the very
structure of human existence.” A human is constituted by history, or time,
the structure of human life. Being and Time (1927) Existentialism.

55 Language is the dimension in which human life moves, we are only

human by participating in language’s existence. Being includes both
subject and object. We should be humble before Nature; Heidegger was
another proponent of the organic society and briefly a supporter of Hitler.

56 For Heidegger art is the only means through which phenomenological

truth manifests itself, where we see things as they really are. We
don’t do literary interpretation, we let it happen to us.

57 Heidegger: “hermeneutical phenomenology”. Husserl: “transcendental

phenomenology”.

58 For Husserl meaning was an “intentional object”, fixed and identical

with whatever the author “intended”. ED Hirsch Jr (Validity in
Interpretation (1967)) agrees but also thinks a work can have many valid
interpretations, all within the system the author’s meaning permits. For
Hirsch and Husserl meaning is pre-linguistic, althoguh we’re not sue how
that is supposed to work.

61-64 Han-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method), following from

Heidegger, says we can never know the author’s work “as it is”; our
interpretation always depends on our current situation. The prejudices we
bring to the interpretation are OK because they have been formed by the
tradition itself and so connect us with the work. This is hermeneutics. But
it assumes a single artistic tradition through history without conflicting
ideologies.

64 Most recent development of hermeneutics in Gemany is ‘reception

theory’ which also concentrates on recent works (unlike Gadamer), and it
examines the reader’s role in lit.

Three stages of modern lit theory, focusing on different things: author

(Romanticism and 19C); text (New Criticism); reader.

65-67 For reception theory reading is a dynamic process

As we read on we shed assumptions, revise beliefs, make more and more

complex inferences and anticipations; each sentence opens up a horizon
which is confirmed, challenge or undermined by the next. … All this
complicated activity is carried out on many levels at once, for the text has
‘backgrounds’ and ‘foregrounds’, different narrative viewpoints,
alternateive layers of meaning between which we are constantly moving.

67-68 Wolfgang Iser (The Act of Reading (1978). Texts deploy ‘codes’,
sets of rules which govern the ways it produces meanings. We apply
codes to interpret works, but there may be a mismatch. For Iser the most
effective work is forces the reader to examine their customary codes and
epectations.

69 He says a reader with a strong ideology will be inadequate as they

won’t be open to a text’s tranformative power. But this means a reader
should be open to change, so any transformation is less profound. And
what you define as a ‘literary’ work is one that is open to these methods
of enquiry, so what you get out of the work depends on what you put in.

70 Iser says readers are free to interpret a text in different ways but they
must construct it in such a way as to render it internally consistent. An
‘open’ work must become coherent, indeterminacies must be
‘normalized’.

70-71 Roland Barthes (The Pleasure of the Text (1973), also a reception
theorist, looks at modern works. The reader cannot make a coherent
whole but must revel in the glimpses of meaning, textures of words.
Barthes and Iser both largely ignore the reader’s social and historical
position.

72-73 A work is written for an ‘implied reader’ (Iser) who has the correct
understanding to make some sense of the subject and language.
73-74 If a work is only the many readers’ interpretations, in what sense
are we reading the same work? Stanley Fish says we aren’t, a novel is the
sum of its interpretations. What then is it that is being interpreted, “the
text in itself”? Fish says he doesn’t know, there is nothing “immanent” in
the work waiting to be released.

75-76 We cannot make a text mean anything we like, “the idea is a

simple fantasy bred in the minds of those who have spent too long in the
classroom”. A text belongs to language as a whole, has relations to other
linguistic practices. “Its meaning is to some extenr ‘immanent’ in it.”
Also “the stock of socially legitimated ways of reading works … operates
as a constraint.”

3. Structuralism and Semiotics

79-81 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), moved on from New

Criticism. Created a detailed system of how lit functioned, and said that
over the years it cycles through four phases: comic, romantic, tragic and
ironic. Lit exists within a history, but it is purely the history of lit; it has
no reference to the wider world. “Lit is not a way of knowing reality but a
kind of collective utopian dreaming”, a kind of substitute religion.

82-83 In structuralism images in a text only have meaning in relation to

each other, not to external things. The content is much less relevant than
the form; items in the text could be changed and it would still be
structurally the same.

83 Structuralism is indifferent to the cultural value of the text. It refuses

the ‘obvious’ meaning and looks to ‘deep’ structures within. The
narrative is about itself, the ‘content’ is its structure.

84 Structuralism in all subjects is based on Ferdinand Saussure’s

structural linguistics (Course in General Linguistics (1916) but lit struc
flourished in 1960s). Language is a system of signs, each “made up of a
‘signifier’ (a sound-image, or its graphic equivalent), and a ‘signified’
(the concept of meaning)”. eg the word “cat” and the idea of the animal.
Relation between the two is arbitrary. The relation between this whole
sign and the object it refers to, the ‘referent’ is therefore also aritrary.

85 Roman Jakobson was a Russian Formalist and modern structuralism

was born out of him meeting Claude Lévi-Strauss. For Jakobson, in
poetics “the sign is dislocated from its object” and the sign is allowed
value in itself.
87 Structuralism is a method of enquiry and semiotics is the study of a
system of signs (like struc. lit theory). But structuralism tends to use
semiotics and struc reduces all things to systems of signs.

87-88 Founder of semitiotics CS Peirce

distinguished between three basic kinds of sign. There was the ‘iconic’,
where the sign somehow resembled what it stood for (a photograph of a
person, for example); the ‘indexical’, in which the sign is somehow
associated with what it is a sign of (smoke with fire, spots with measles),
and the ‘symbolic’, where as with Saussure the sign is only arbitrarily or
conventionally linked with its referent. Semiotics takes up this and many
other classifications: it distinguishes between ‘denotation’ (what the sign
stands for) and ‘connotation’ (other signs associated with it); between
codes (the rule-governed structures which produce meanings) and the
messages transmitted by them; between the ‘paradigmatic’ (a whole class
of signs which may stand in for one another) and the ‘syntagmitic’ (where
signs are coupled together with each other in a ‘chain’). It speaks of
‘metalanguages’, where one sign-system denotes another sign-system (the
relation between literary criticism and literature, for instance), ‘poysemic’
signs which have more than one meaning, and a great many other
technical concepts.

88-89 For Yury Lotman a poetic text is a ‘system of systems’ with every
tension, parallelism, repetition, opposition continually modifying all the
others. Eg the poem’s rhythm may be interrupted by its syntax. what is a
‘device’ is decided by the reader: “one person’s poetic device be
another’s daily speech”.

90 Structuralism had a big impact on the study of narrative. Eg for Lévi

Strauss there were a few basic themes behind all myths, and these had
their own rules, a grammar. These are inherent in the human mind so in
looking at myths we are looking at the mental operations that structure it.
“Myths have a quasi-objective collective existence, unfold their own
‘concrete logic’ with supreme disregard for the vagaries of individual
thought, and reduce any particular consciousness to a mere function of
themselves.”

94 Structuralism said “reality was not reflected by language

but produced by it. The world is not simply how we perceive it. “It
undermines the empericism of the literary humanists — the belief that
what is most ‘real’ is what is experienced, and that the home of this rich,
subtle, complex experience is literature itself.”
98-99 Structuralism sees language as an object rather than a practice with
human subjects, ignores the practical conditions in which a language
operates.

101-102 Mikhail Bakhtin reacted against this “objectivist” linguistics.

Signs weren’t fixed units but changed depending on who said them to
who and in what social and historical context.

102-103 JL Austin, How to Do Things With Words (1962). Speech act

theory. All language is “performative”. Lit may describe the world, state
facts, but its real function is bringing about certain effects in the reader
(although as a lit text is not a speech act he dismisses it as defective).

104-106 “In reading, we build up a sense of what kind of effects this

language is trying to achieve (‘intention’).” “None of this need be
identical with the intentions, attitudes and assumptions of the actual
historical author.” The reader was someone who could understand the
work “as it was”, although such an objective reader, free of class, gender,
cultural influences, etc does not exist.

4. Post-Structuralism

110-111 The signified (the concept of a boat) is not only what it is

because of its signifier (“boat”) but also because of all the signifiers it
isn’t (“moat”, “boar”, etc). Look up a signifier in a dictionary and the
signified (the definition) is made up of more signifiers, etc.
“Structuralism divided the sign from the referent”, post-structuralism
“divides the signifier from the signified.” “Meaning is not
immediately present in a sign.” The meaning of a word in a text is
affected by those before and after it.

111-112 “It is difficult to know what a sign ‘originally’ means” because

its context is always different. I can never be fully present to you through
what I say or write because the meaning of the signs is always in flux. I
can also never have a pure meaning or intention myself as I am made up
of language.

113 Western philosophical tradition “has consistently vilified writing”

because it is always at one remove from one’s consciousness, whereas
speech is more immediate. But this ignores the mutability of the signs in
speech too.
114-116 There can be no transcendental, original meaning to a thought-
system as we always want to go beyond it. First principles can always be
“deconstructed” as products of a particular system of meaning. They are
often defined by what they exclude, are part of the binary opposition
beloved of structuralism (and ideologies in general).

117-118 Roland Barthes. A “healthy” sign draws attention to its own

arbitrariness. Signs which pass themselves off as “natural” and the only
way of seeing the world are authoritarian and ideological. Realist
literature has this “natural attitude”, tries to give us reality “as it is” and
denies the productive character of language. The “double” sign “gestures
to its owm material existence at the same time as it conveys a meaning”.
Formalists, Czec structuralists, German Weimar Republic (including
Brecht), Bolshevik Futurists.

119-120 A lit work is no longer something to be read but

something writable. It is not a stable structure and the critic is now a
producer not just consumer. A “writable” text has no set meaning, “an
inexhaustible tissue or galaxy of signifiers”. Barthes’ S/Z (1970), a study
of Balzac’s story Sarrasine.

122-125 [Stuff about Paris in 1968 etc. Can’t quite fathom the exact
relationship between that and post-structuralism.]

125-130 [More stuff about politics and post-structuralism that leaves me

wanting a definition of what post-structuralism actualy is. It sounds
important but is very vague. Feminism. Michel Foucault.]

5. Psychoanalysis

131-132 Freud. We must work to survive and in doing so we repress the

“pleasure principle”, our tendencies to pleasure and gratification. We
might “sublimate” unfulfilled desires by directing them to a more socially
valued end.

132-135 As children grow, become aware of sexuality. Oedipus complex.

Acceptance of and adoption of masculine/feminine roles. “We turn from
incest to extra- familial relations; and from Nature to Culture”.

136-137 The child now has an ego, identity, but only by repressing its
guilty desires into the unconscious. Dreams are our main access to the
unconscious. They are “symbolic fulfilments of unconscious wishes” but
filtered by the ego and confused by the unconscious — metaphor,
metonymy.

137-138 We may have unconscious desires that won’t be denied but find
no outlet. “The desire forces its way in fro the unconscious, the ego
blocks it off defensively, and the result of this internal conflict is what we
call neurosis.” Psychoanalysis sees unresolved conflicts behind neuroses
which stem from the Oedipal moment. If the ego cannot partly repress the
unconscious desire psychosis occurs, the unconscious builds up an
alternative, delusional reality.

142-146 Jacques Lacan’s take on Freudianism. Reinterprets him in the

light of structuralist and post-structuralist theories and looks at the
relationship to language.

146-147 The unconscious and dreams, for Lacan, is composed not of

signs but of signifiers, and it is not obvious what they signify. Language
is slippery and we can never say exactly what we mean or mean what we
say. When we use “I” in a sentence we can never fully represent ourself.

147-148 Literature draws attention to how something is said, not

just what is said, unlike, say a textbook. The work will not be taken for
the absolute truth and the reader is encouraged to think about this
particular representation of reality. Bertolt Brecht. Avant-garde film-
making vs Hollywood.

148-150 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’

in Lenin and Philosophy (1971). Individuals are merely products of
several social structures. But we experience ourselves as free,
autonomous individuals. How? We feel that society is not an impersonal
structure but something that addresses us personally, as though the world
is centered on ourselves. Ideology is the set of beliefs and practices that
does this centering. It is things like going to church, voting, letting wome
through doors first, how I dress.

150 For Lacan the unconscious is not just within us but an effect of our
relations with one another. Language is similar. Language, the
unconscious, parents, the symbolic order — the ‘Other’.

159 Harold Bloom rewrote literary history in terms of the Oedipus

complex. A poet is overshadowed by a previous poet, like a son is a
father, and tries to disarm that strength by revising and recasting the
earlier poem. A return to Protestant Romanticism of heroic battling
giants.

160-161 Classical narrative for Freud, something is lost, it is distressing

but exciting, but we know the object will be restored. But also what we
have might one day disappear forever.

162 Naturalistic theatre, eg Shaw: the discourse may urge change and
criticism but the form enforces the solidity of this social world. To break
with these ways of seeing it would need to move beyond naturalism (later
Ibsen and Strindberg), jolting audience out of the reassurance of
recognition. Brecht’s “estrangement effect” makes the most taken-for-
granted aspects of reality unfamiliar to unsettle the audience’s
convictions.

163 Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (1974). [Don’t

understand the description of the “semiotic”.]

Conclusion: Political Criticism

169-170 Literary theory is always political. “The great majority of the

literary theories outlined in this book have strengthened rather than
challenged the assumptions of the power-system some of whose present-
day consquences [nuclear stockpiles, poverty] I have just described.”

171 Modern literary theory has ignored modern ideologies and history in
favour of a flight into the poem, the human mind, myth, language, etc.

171-173 There is no common method that defines literary theories, and

no common object (impossible to define what literature is). Many
methods are mutually exclusive. One may choose to work without a
method, using only intuition, but this “will depend on a latent structure of
assumptions”.

173-175 Liberal humanism is part of the “official” ideology of modern

capitalism, but in practice its values are only paid lip service.
Departments of literature, due to their funding, are part of the
“ideological apparatus of the modern capitlalist state”. As a student

nobody is especially concerned about what you say, with what extreme,
moderate, radical or conservative positions you adopt, provided that they
are compatible with, and can be articulated within, a specific form of
discourse. It is just that certain meanings and positions will not be
articulable within it. Literary studies, in other words, are a question of the
signifier, not of the signified.”

175 “Certain pieces of writing are selected as being more amenable to

this discourse than others, and these are what is known as literature or the
‘literary canon’.”

175-178 This is an arbitrary definition and should be an embarrassment to

literary criticism. Lit crit tries to keep itself alive by adding, say,
historical analysis or structuralism, but this only makes it obvious that
other objects can have literary theory applied to them too. Literary theory,
like literature, is an illusion, and should not be a discipline distinct from
philsophy, linguistics, psychology, etc. This book is an obituary.

179-180 He wants to return literary criticsm to the paths of traditional

Rhetoric, which analysed, and produced, all kinds of discourse.

180-183 We should not ask what lierature is or how to approach it

but why we should want to engage with it. The liberal humanist response
is reasonable but useless (it overestimates the power of literature to make
you a “better person” and ignores social context).

183-184 With rhetoric (or “discourse theory” or “cultural studies”) you

decie what you want to do and choose the appropriate methods and
objects.

187-189 There are four occasions when culture “becomes newly relevant,
charged with a significance beyond itself”: “In the lives of nations
struggling for their independence from imperialism”; the women’s
movement; the “culture industry” [I think he’s saying something about
fighting the dumbing down of the media’s discourse]; working-class
writing. It would be good if the study of traditional literary subjects
“could become as charged with energy, urgency and enthusiasm
as [these] activities”.

Afterword

190-192 In late 1960s and early 1970s there were more students for
whom the supposedly universal values of literature were alien. So the
Russian Formalists, French structuralists and German reception theorists
came into fashion. As structuralism revealed the same codes traversed
both high and low cultures, a new field of enquiry, “cultural studies”,
emerged.
192-194 End of 1970s, revolutionary movements faded, capitalism
reasserted itself. Feminism and post-structuralism came to the fore. There
have been few breakthroughs in feminist theory since the 1970s but it has
become “the most popular of all the new approaches to literature.”

195-196 Marxist criticism languished since late 1970s. Western

capitalism proved too strong for the mass movements that fought against
it. So maybe new, smaller organisations and theories were needed. “There
was no longer a coherent system or unified history to be opposed, just a
discrete set of powers, discourses, practices, narratives.

196-197 Foucault and Lacan popular during 1980s. Derrida and

deconstruction faded.

197-198 New historicism focused on the Renaissance. Ignored many

topics, often if they didn’t crop up in Foucault or if they had little bearing
on present-day US culture.

198-199 In Britain, Raymond Williams’ “cultural materialism” took hold.

A way of examining culture as being thoroughly social and material. [Not
sure what this actually means.]

199-200 During 1980s many of the political areas that post-structuralism

ignored became more important. It couldn’t compete with the German
tradition of philosophical enquiry from Hegel to Habermas. A resurgence
of interest in Russian Mikhail Bakhtin.

200-202 “Postmodernity means the end of modernity, in the sense of

those grand narratives of truth, reason, science, progress and universal
emancipation which are taken to characterize modern thought from the
Enlightenment onwards.” Postmodernism is “the form of culture which
corresponds to this world view. The typical postmodernist work of art is
arbitrary, eclectic, hybrid, decentered, fluidm discontinuous, pastiche-
like.” Spurns metaphyisal profundity. Ironic. Relativist. Suspects all
hierarchies of value as privileged and elitist.

204-206 Post-colonial theory has been second only to feminist criticism

by mid-1990s. The “other” as groups written out of history. Over-
emphasizes cultural dimension of life in overreaction to previous
biologism, humanism or economism.

Comments
 Ted Mills at 8 May 2007, 5:38am. Permalink

I love the fact that the stuff you don't understand is in grey text. These are
grey areas indeed.

What we are seeing now, I think, is the nervous end of post-modernism.

What replaces it? A humanist-romanticism? Or maybe post-modernism
can't truly end w/out some major destruction of the west...which post-
modernism helps happen.

 nick s at 8 May 2007, 8:54pm. Permalink

Ah, memories of first year crit-theory lectures with the man himself,
when frankly I wasn't clued (or attentive) enough, as I realised a few
years on.

Never did own that particular primer, though, and picking up on Ted, it
feels a little dated, not least because to some extent We Are All New
Historicists Now, especially in my field.

Williams comes out of a Marxist tradition (as does Eagleton himself), and
the basic thrust of his work is to ground cultural developments in broad
social change, particularly industrialisation, mass production and the
changing nature of 'popular culture'. His particular argument is that
culture isn't just an expression of social change -- the classic Marxist
superstructure/base dichotomy -- but that culture is entirely integrated
into society. (I like this essay's summary, though it only scrapes the
surface.)