The Presentation . . .

My name is Terry Eagleton and I am a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and have written over 8 books.  I was born into a rural working-class family in Salford England and was educated at Trinity College.  At Trinity I became a student and disciple of Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams.  Since Williams’s death in 1988 I have been regarded as the premier British Marxist literary critic.  I have found that contemporary theories lack attention to politics; therefore I praise Marxist and feminist criticism for their concern with the political effects of literature.

In my first work of literary criticism titled Literary Theory: An Introduction I argue, “that literature concerns not simply beauty and spiritual uplift, but the social control of the middle and working classes.  I feel that the discipline of literature, like formal religion, is deeply involved in the reproduction of the dominant social order.  To demonstrate, I wrote a song that goes a little something like this:

Chaucer was a class traitor
Shakespeare hated the mob
Donne sold out a bit later
Sidney was a nob.

There are only three names
To be plucked from this dismal set
Milton Blake and Shelley
Will smash the ruling class yet! (2241)

I see the discipline of “English as an outgrowth of nationalism as well as a replacement for religion as a crucial ideological apparatus“ (2242).  I propose to you that “literature, has social significance not simply as an innocent, pleasurable entertainment but as a primary means of reinforcing dominant social order” (2242).

My new book, titled “After Theory is an example of how I have been instrumental in changing the intellectual lives, and curricula, of a generation of undergraduates.  In the early 1980’s when students of English literature were either battling Beowulf or plowing through prose by literary theorists announcing the Death of the Author and the pre-eminence of the Text, I took the literary theoretical bull by the horns and deconstructed it” (citation).

“Students today are engaging neither with history nor with post structuralism.  ‘What is sexy instead is sex’.  Quietly spoken middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye gouging, cyborgs and porno movies.  Cast adrift in the stormy currents of postmodernism, these students prefer to focus their energy on the history of pubic hair or the evolution of the television show “Friends”, a trend that I find politically catastrophic” (citation).

Hello.  Nikole is back with a few comments on Terry Eagleton.  Truthfully, when I was first assigned Terry Eagleton I wasn't that that excited.  However, after I began researching the contribution he has made to critical thought, I found a genuine appreciation of Eagleton’s stress for “an urgent need for fresh, and more profound, thinking about the world we are currently living in”.  I also appreciate his ability to “make theory accessible to students and nonspecialists therefore reminding readers of the social role literature plays in the public sphere” (2242).