Literary Theory: an Obituary

Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Terry Eagleton calls his book an "introduction" to literary theory, but rather hopes that he is writing its obituary. He traces the recent history of literary criticism which was initially devoted to getting "English" accepted as a suitable subject to be studied at university, and the focus was generally on the question "what is literature?"

He examines various schools of literary theory, which were mostly linked to contemporary philosophical trends, such as phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism and the psychoanalytic school, and points out the inadequacies of all of them. He notes that all are dominated by the question "what is literature", and notes that it becomes a kind of academic racket and power game of indoctrinating students by teaching them to use a certain kind of discourse:

Its apparent generosity at the level of the signified is matched only by its sectarian intolerance at the level of the signifier. Regional dialects of the discourse, so to speak, are acknowledged and sometimes tolerated, but you must not sound as though you are speaking another language altogether. To do so is to recognize in the sharpest way that critical discourse is power. To be on the inside of the discourse itself is to be blind to this power, for what is more natural and non-dominative than to speak one's own tongue?

The power of critical discourse moves on several levels. It is the power of "policing" language -- of determining that certain statements must be excluded because they do not conform to what is acceptably sayable. It is the power of policing writing itself, classifying it into "literary" and "non-literary", the enduringly great and the ephemerally popular. It is the power of authority vis-a-vis others -- the power relations between those who define and preserve the discourse, and those who are selectively admitted to it. It is the power of certificating or non-certificating those who who have been judged to speak the discourse better or worse. Finally, it is a question of the power relations between the literary academic institution, where all of this occurs, and the ruling power-interests of society at large, whose ideological needs will be served and whose personnel will be reproduced by the preservation and controlled extension of the discourse in question (Eagleton 1983:203)

In my experience this academic power game is not confined to English Departments of universities, it is found in several other departments too, often driven by the same philosophical schools.

I studied English literature at two universities. The one, Wits (University of the Witwatersrand) did not seem to adhere to any particular school (but in my naivety as a first-year student I may not have been able to recognise it), and covered a fairly broad spread of literature. The second, the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg (now UKZN) was firmly wedded to the Leavisite school, and had a very narrow conception of what constituted "literature" so I was fairly sympathetic to Eagleton's approach. Academic fads change with time, though, and no doubt the English Department at UKZN has a different emphasis today. At the time, however, it put me off  majoring in English. 

My real education in English literature came from another source altogether -- an Anglican monk, Brother Roger, CR, who lent me all sorts of books to read from the community library, none of which appeared in the university English syllabuses -- Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, Iris Murdoch and Charles Williams, to name a few. 

Eagleton concludes with a suggestion that is both radical and reactionary -- that English Departments at universities should be abolished, in the sense of studying English "literature", and should be replaced by a wider study of communication, which was covered by the older academic study of Rhetoric. This should be applied not merely to texts like Milton's "Paradise Lost", but also to newspaper articles, advertising and the like -- all forms of communication, whether written or spoken.

I'm not sure, though, whether university departments of Communication don't already do that. 


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