Monday, February 18, 2008

Political Criticism (Eagleton) by Leah C

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Lilly Bridwell-Bowles said...

From Leah C: “Political Criticism”- Terry Eagleton or
Eagleton’s Obituary to Literary Theory

Literary Theory Explained (or an attempt to)
p.500
What is the point of literary theory? Are there not bigger world issues at hand?
Politics (political theory and ideological values) has been present in literary theory from the beginning.
Politics- the way we organize our social life together, and the power-relations which this involves
Literary theory- a particular perspective in which to view the history of our times, not an object of intellectual enquiry in its own right.
No pure literary theory because “any body of theory concerned with human meaning, value, language, feeling and experience will inevitably engage with broader, deeper beliefs about the nature of human individuals and societies, problems of power and sexuality, interpretations of past history, versions of the present and hopes for the future”
p. 501
Eagleton offers political criticism. It is not an alternative to past literary theories. It tells us that literary theory as we know it has always been POLITICAL.
Literary theory has helped wittingly or not to sustain, reinforce, and STRENGTHEN rather than challenged assumptions of the POWER-SYSTEM. *Jenkins has much to say about this***
p. 502
Modern literary thought=Flight from real history =Extremism = to social theory’s Possessive individualism.
Subordinates the sociality of human life to SOLITARY INDIVIDUAL ENTERPRISE.
*Growth Model*
What could Jenkins say here against possessive individualism, concerning GOSSIP being part of literary study because of its socio cultural importance?
p.503
How can literary criticism exist?
1) It cannot define its methods. It often uses methods belonging to history, linguistics, sociology, etc.
2) It has no clearly defined object. *Eagleton says that literature is illusory.
p. 504
Problem with literary theory is that it can neither beat nor join the dominant ideologies of late industrial capitalism. It has an essentially contradictory relationship to modern capitalism.
Problems with the Humanities
The “humanities” exist to reproduce the ‘official’ ideology of our society, but our current social order has very little time for it all.
DEPARTMENTS OF LITERATURE IN HIGHER EDUCATION, THEN, ARE PART OF THE IDEOLOGICAL APPARATUS OF THE MODERN CAPITALIST STATE (which is why our capitalist government continues to fund literary departments).
p. 505
But dept. of lit. are not reliable because ***if you allow a lot of young people to do nothing for a few years but read books and talk to each other then it is possible that, given certain wider historical circumstances, they will not only begin to question some of the values transmitted to them but begin to interrogate the authority by which they are transmitted.
***Isn’t the internet now similar? What happens when people spend hours talking, debating, researching, and connecting to millions of others with different racial, ethnic, and cultural values?
***What happened when women spent hours talking, sharing lived experiences through gossip? ***What happened when slaves spent hours writing songs and sharing their stories?
***Social and political changed happened and the traditional power-system was given a shake down, maybe more.
The Policing of discourse done by Literary Professors, theorists, and critics
The problem with departments of literature being the ‘place’ for our dissent and debate is that while no one will tell you WHAT to believe, the dept. of lit. tell us HOW to use language in ‘acceptable’ ways. What we think is constrained by specific rules of discourse.
Custodians of discourse- literary theorists, critics, and teachers.
The embarrassment of literary criticism is that it defines for itself a special object, literature, while existing as a set of discursive techniques which have no reason to stop short at that object at all. Besides, who decides on the ‘literary canon?’ Eagleton says: the arbitrary authority of the literary institution?
***Yay LSU! My film studies professor has her office next to the Dept. of English in Allen Hall.
p. 506
There is no such thing as literature which is ‘really’ great, or ‘really’ anything, independently of the ways in which that writing is treated within specific forms of social and institutional life.
Literary criticism selects, processes, corrects and rewrites texts in accordance with certain institutionalized norms of the ‘literary’-norms which are at any given time arguable, and always historically variable.
Policing power of language and of writing itself- classifying the enduringly great and the ephemerally popular.
Non literary= Ephemeral- lasting for only a short period of time and leaving no permanent trace
Literary= Enduring- persisting or surviving
p. 507
Power structure: Whose ideological needs will be served?
Literary theory is an illusion!
1) it is really no more than a branch of social ideologies without any unity or identity which would adequately distinguish it from philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cultural and sociological thought
2) its one hope of distinguishing itself of clinging to an object named literature is misplaced.
Eagleton’s Proposal
p. 508
Counter literary theory with a different kind of discourse of:
Culture
Signifying practices
…so as to end the use of valuable theories on some obscure subject called “literature” and to place the theories in a wider political context.
Concern for the kinds of effects which discourses produce, and how they produce them.
Rhetoric-examined the way discourses are constructed in order to achieve certain effects. Interested in grasping such discursive practices as forms of power and performance. Saw writing and speaking as forms of activity inseparable from the wider social relations between writers and readers and unintelligible outside the social purposes and conditions in which they were embedded.
Just because literary theory is an illusion, does not mean we cannot revive from it many valuable concepts for a different kind of discursive practice altogether.
p.509-510
Liberal Humanism
Humanists say that dealing with literature is worth while because it makes you a better person
-This is a weal response because it considers literature’s transformative powers in isolation from social contexts and because ‘better person’ is formulated in only the most abstract of terms.
Mostly concerned with interpersonal matters, not applied to society as a whole.
What it means to be a ‘better person’ must be concrete and practical, concerned with people’s political situations as a whole rather than concerned only with the immediate interpersonal.
Liberal Humanism ‘uses’ literature to further certain moral values and in the end imply a particular form of politics.
Its values govern the reading process and its criticisms.
So, even those critics claiming to be concerned with humanism, not politics, are still related to politics.
Political and Ideological Criticism
p.512
Ideology- the link between discourses and power
People tend to give the term ‘Political Criticism’ to criticism whose politics disagrees with their own, but this cannot be so.
Cultural artefacts- any object having value, recognized as a signifier of a culture… I’d like a better definition….any suggestions?
Pleasure, enjoyment, the potentially transformative effects of discourse is quite as proper a topic for higher study as is the setting of puritan tracts in the discursive formations of the seventeenth century. Or other occasions that might prove more useful will not be the criticism or enjoyment of other people’s discourse but the production of one’s own. (studying what other people have done may help)
***Important here to realize how even a student can participate in several ways. We are consumers AND producers here. Not just producers of our own beliefs, like modern literary thought allowed us, but we are producers of our own ‘use’ of language.
One effect of the word ‘literature’ is to prevent us from recognizing how texts can be rewritten, recycled, put to different uses, inserted into different relations and practices.
Future for Higher Education Literature Departments
p. 514
What may replace traditional literature departments may be departments that centrally involve education in the various theories and methods of cultural analysis.
***Catano’s class on Cultural Studies. This class. Is LSU’s literary department guilty of having ‘scandalous and farcical features?’
The lack of existing departments has kept real criticism in the hands of the elite, thus reinforcing power-structures.
p. 515-516
Four moments when culture has suddenly become relevant, charged with a significance beyond itself:
1)Imperialism
2) Women’s Movement
3) Media
4) Working-Class Writing
Doubtful that Shakespeare and Proust will ever become as charged with as much energy, urgency, and enthusiasm as these 4 activities, when these texts are hermetically sealed from history, subjected to a sterile critical formalism, piously swaddled with eternal verities and used to confirm prejudices which any moderately enlightened student can perceive to be objectionable.

February 18, 2008 at 4:16 PM
Lilly Bridwell-Bowles said...

Nice job on a jam-packed article. Classmates will appreciate the outline at midterm time, no doubt. Good to see connections to Jenkins. Don't you believe that Proust and Shakespeare are hermetically sealed! Much vibrant scholarship on WS--from every theoretical perspective we've imagined! Dr. L

February 19, 2008 at 2:00 PM

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