By TERRY EAGLETON*
Foreword to the newly published book
Literary theory has been quite out of fashion in recent decades, so much so that books like this are increasingly rare. There are those who will be eternally grateful for this, most of whom will not read this preface. It would have been difficult to foresee, in the 1970s or 1980s, that, generally speaking, semiotics, poststructuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis and the like would, thirty years later, become foreign languages for students. The change has occurred, roughly, due to a quartet of concerns: postcolonialism, ethnicity, sexuality, and cultural studies. This is not exactly encouraging news for the theory's conservative opponents—they were no doubt hoping for a decline that would herald a return to status quo ante.
Postcolonialism, ethnicity, sexuality, and cultural studies are not, of course, without suspicion of theory. Nor do they simply emerge from its decline. Indeed, their emergence in full force has occurred in the wake of “pure” or “high” theory, and many people see the phenomenon as a superseding. Indeed, not only a superseding but also a displacement. In a sense, we are talking about a welcome development. Various forms of theorizing (though not obscurantism) have been pushed aside.
What has happened, broadly speaking, is a shift: from discourse to culture, from ideas in a more or less abstract or virginal state to an investigation of what, in the 1970s and 1980s, it would have been imprudent to call the real world. As always, however, there are losses and gains. Analyzing vampires or Family Guy[1] probably not as intellectually rewarding as studying Freud and Foucault. Furthermore, the steady decline in popularity of “high” theory, as I argued in After the theory, is closely linked to the declining fortunes of the political left.[2]
The years when such thinking was at its height were also when the left was prosperous and robust. As theory lost its footing, radical critique quietly disappeared with it. At its peak, cultural theory posed some surprisingly ambitious questions about the social order it confronted. Today, when that regime is even more global and powerful than it once was, it is rare for the very word “capitalism” to smack on the lips of those busy celebrating difference, embracing otherness, or dissecting the undead. This state of affairs is a testament to the power of the system, not its irrelevance.
Yet in a sense this book is also an implicit rebuke to literary theory. Much of my argument, with the exception of the final chapter, is based not on literary theory but on that very different animal, the philosophy of literature. Literary theorists have too often ignored this kind of discourse, and in doing so they play their stereotypical part in the old dispute between continental Europeans and Anglo-Saxons.
If literary theory emerged largely among the former, philosophy of literature emerged largely among the latter. However, the rigor and expertise The techniques of the best philosophy of literature contrast favorably with the intellectual laxity of some literary theories, not to mention the approach to questions (the nature of fiction, for example) largely ignored by those in the other camp.
Radicals, for their part, tend to suspect that questions like “Can there be a definition of literature?” are dryly academic and ahistorical. But not all attempts at definition need be like this—so much so that in the radical camp many can agree when it comes to defining the capitalist mode of production or the nature of neo-imperialism. Wittgenstein suggests that sometimes we need a definition and sometimes we don’t. There is an irony at play here, too.
Many on the cultural left, for whom definitions are obsolete matters to be left to conservative academics, are probably unaware that, in fact, when it comes to art and literature, most of these academics argue against the possibility of such definitions. What happens is that the most perceptive among them give more convincing and suggestive reasons for what they do, and thus distinguish themselves from those who consider definitions futile by definition.
Readers will be surprised, and perhaps dismayed, to find themselves plunged from the outset into a discussion marked by medieval scholasticism. Perhaps it is my own stench of scholasticism, to borrow a phrase from Joyce, that helps to explain my interest in the issues addressed in this book. There is certainly a connection between my having been brought up Catholic – and so I was taught not to distrust the powers of analytical reason, among other things – and my later career as a literary theorist. Some might also attribute my interest in the philosophy of literature to the fact that I spent too much time in the blatantly Anglo-Saxon citadels of Oxford and Cambridge.
Yet one need not be an ex-Papist or an ex-Oxbridge professor to appreciate the strangeness of a situation in which teachers and students of literature are in the habit of using words like “literature,” “fiction,” “poetry,” “narrative,” and so on without being fully equipped to engage in a discussion of what they mean. Literary theorists are the ones who find this as strange or as alarming as finding doctors who, though able to recognize a pancreas by sight, are unable to explain its workings.
Furthermore, there are many important questions that the phenomenon of the retreat from literary theory has left hanging, and this book attempts to address some of them. I begin by considering the question of whether or not things have general natures, which has an obvious bearing on the question of whether or not it is possible to talk about “literature.” I then look at how the term “literature” is generally used today, and to do so I examine each of the features that I consider central to the meaning of the word.
One of these features, fictionality, is so complex that it requires a chapter of its own. Finally, I turn to the question of literary theory, asking whether it is possible to show that its various forms have central attributes in common. If I were immodest, I would say that this book offers a sensible account of what literature (at least at present) really means, and that it also draws attention, for the first time, to what almost all literary theories have in common. But I am not, so I will not say that.[3]
*Terry Eagleton, philosopher and literary critic, is professor emeritus of English literature at the University of Oxford. Author, among other books, of The meaning of life (unesp). [https://amzn.to/4ii1u5c]
Reference
Terry Eagleton. The Event of Literature. Translated by: Thomaz Kawauche. São Paulo, Unesp, 2024, 320 pages. [https://amzn.to/3Z8cRnn]
Notes
[1] American animated series created by Seth MacFarlane and broadcast by Fox between 1999 and 2002; in Brazil, it received the title A heavy family. (NT)
[2] Eagleton, After Theory, chap.2.
[3] I am grateful to Jonathan Culler, Rachael Lonsdale and Paul O'Grady, who offered insightful criticisms and suggestions. I am also indebted to my son Oliver Eagleton, who talked to me about the idea of pretense and clarified several vital points.
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