The prolific Terry Eagleton has grow to be considered one of Britain’s most respected public intellectuals, whose writing incorporates Marxist and Catholic perspectives. He has written over 40 books on religion, philosophy and culture, in addition to literary theory and literary and social criticism.
His latest, The Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Modified the Way We Read, focuses on T. S. Eliot and 4 critics related to Cambridge University: I. A. Richards, William Empson, F. R. Leavis and Raymond Williams, all of whom revolutionized literary study and foreshadowed the Latest Criticism movement that became widespread in mid-century American universities. At Cambridge, these 4 made English studies a middle of “response to what seemed the impoverishment of each life and language.” Eagleton deals with their ideas in his typically engaging and perceptive way.
“Literary discourse,” Eagleton says, got here to supply them an alternative choice to the “purely instrumental ends to which a crass, technological society had harnessed” human interactions and where “language, individuals, values, and relationships may very well be treated as ends in themselves.” This meant that literary critics acquired the “responsibilities of the priest, prophet or politician,” and that unpacking a metaphor became an exercise of social responsibility.
Eagleton posits T. S. Eliot as “an unstable compound of bourgeois stuffiness and literary saboteur, moving between genteel Mayfair and bohemian Soho.”
Eagleton is maybe especially comfortable in discussing these five scholars because he attended Cambridge University and either had listened to them within the lecture hall or otherwise met them (aside from Eliot, though he knew individuals who were directly acquainted with Eliot).
Eagleton’s Marxist views put him at odds with the reactionary Eliot, yet he observes that despite his conservatism, Eliot nonetheless “rejects capitalism’s greed, selfish individualism and pursuit of fabric interests.” Nor does Eliot’s elitism “exclude a priority for the common people,” and his views are hardly those of the Conservative Party in the UK today.
He posits Eliot as “an unstable compound of bourgeois stuffiness and literary saboteur, moving between genteel Mayfair and bohemian Soho.” As Eagleton says, for Eliot “the business of criticism is to guage various nuances of feeling, whether ‘decadent’ or sentimentalist, ebullient or enervated, sardonic or sublime,” since his “interest isn’t a lot what a poem says…as with the ‘structure of emotions’ it embodies.”
Whatever his famously conservative views, Eliot’s version of social criticism could be very much his own: He was as much a critic of the social orthodoxies of his day as George Orwell, except that “his critique is launched from the correct quite than the left.”
Eliot is understood for his commitment to tradition, yet “his attitude toward tradition isn’t all that traditional.” For him, tradition works backward in addition to forward, in order that “when a latest piece of writing enters the literary canon, it retrospectively changes the relations between previous works, allowing us to view them in a latest light.” Eagleton sees this as an try to reclaim the writer’s avant-garde literary practice “for a conservative poetics.”
As for Eliot’s anti-Romantic insistence that the poem should extinguish any self-expression, Eagleton finds that it renders the poet too passive, a “receptacle…like a catalyst in a chemical experiment.” He sees a political reason behind this. Eliot, he says, finds this impersonality to be an antidote to the fantasy of a potentially “boundless self…a daydream typical of the US.”
I. A. Richards has perhaps had a fair more direct influence on U.S. literary studies than Eliot. He disrupted the dilettantish approach to literature prevalent at Cambridge—“literary gossip, good taste, and stylish belles lettres, not disciplined critical intelligence.” Of Eagleton’s five subjects, Richards is the lone theorist, and his work consists of “essentially the most systematic defence of poetry to be present in the English language.” His materialism and (supposedly) scientific approach to poetry put him at odds together with his peers; he thought literary criticism must be “a branch of the science of psychology.”
For Richards, “great poetry represents the best, most delicate and efficient organization of impulses available to humanity,” rendering poetry not didactic, but a sort of mental hygiene. Getting that profit requires educational skill within the close reading of poems, something he felt students lacked. In Practical Criticism (1929), Richards presented a series of unidentified poems and student responses to them, revealing the scholars’ inability to make significant critical responses, then went on to indicate the way it could be done.
More support for close reading got here with William Empson’s Seven Varieties of Ambiguity, which got here out one yr later, “considered one of the best critical works ever to seem in English.” Empson showed how ambiguity can provide richness in compression of language for optimum effect. Examples that Eagleton points to incorporate Hopkins’s “The Windhover” and a unprecedented reading of Herbert’s “The Sacrifice,” wherein Christ’s saying, “Man stole the fruit, but I need to climb the tree,” is ambiguous; the tree is each the cross and the tree onto which Jesus replaces the apple plucked by Eve.
Empson elucidates such multiple paradoxes as: Christ “is scapegoat and tragic hero; loved because hated.” As Eagleton observes, “This…is much more theologically perceptive stuff than the image of God as Stalin”—Empson’s usual view. His awareness, says Eagleton, of “the bounds of the human situation” as “essentially the most fundamental aspect of literary art” gives his “humanism…a tragic inflection.” Eagleton admires his “liberal rationalist habit of deflating and demystifying portentous nonsense,” something at which Eagleton himself has been adept.
For I. A. Richards, “great poetry represents the best, most delicate and efficient organization of impulses available to humanity,” rendering poetry not didactic, but a sort of mental hygiene.
F. R. Leavis, one other advocate of close reading, is maybe best known for his study of the novel in The Great Tradition, from 1948, a study that bristles with pronouncements promoting and demoting various works, in keeping with his view that fiction must be what “makes for all times.” As Eagleton points out, Leavis avoids explanation of his selections because for him, life is the enemy of definition. Literature makes us feel more intensely alive, in keeping with Leavis, though Eagleton comments that “if we feel at our most alive only when reading Middlemarch or The Rainbow [two of Leavis’s favorites], we should be in pretty poor shape.”
In his concluding chapter, Eagleton has special praise for his former Cambridge tutor and friend, Raymond Williams: “Throughout his profession, Williams spoke up for hope while keenly aware of human cruelty and corruption.” Williams got here to dislike close textual reading, which he saw as a way of avoiding larger issues.
Williams’s best-known book, Culture and Society (1958), “spoke urgently to the condition of Britain within the late Nineteen Fifties.” Eagleton sees Williams as making an ambitious try to construct “a radical tradition of his own,” drawing on a wide range of “cultural and free-floating intellectuals to challenge the social order,” from Blake and Coleridge to Orwell and Leavis.
Seeing him as “an ecologist long before the word was usually currency,” Eagleton especially admires Williams for the depth of his humanity and his concept that “[t]he growth of affection and the capability for loving…are fundamental to the event of a society…removed from received positions, on the political left or anywhere else.”