Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs

[Paul Mackin]

Didn't Derrida recently also make some desperation pronouncement about
Theory. Or literary criticism.  Think it was him.

P.

On Sat, 2004-01-03 at 08:29, Dave Monroe wrote:
> The New York times
> January 3, 2004
> Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs
> By DINITIA SMITH
>  
> DUBLIN  Get the critic Terry Eagleton in the right
> mood, and he will sing his song about literary theory
> for you. The ditty may seem nonsensical, but just
> imagine the round-faced and gray-bearded Mr. Eagleton
> singing in a mellow baritone to the tune of "Somethin'
> Stupid":
> 
> "Nostalgic petit-bourgeois social democrat
> subjectivist empiricist,/I saw the light of day," he
> sings, ending the verse, "Until I went and spoiled it
> all by writing something stupid in New Left Review."
> 
> "The song is fiction, ironic," said Mr. Eagleton, 60.
> "It reflects a growing desperation." 
> 
> Yes, desperation about literary theory, from one of
> the most prominent cultural critics around; from a man
> whose best-selling academic book "Literary Theory: An
> Introduction" (1983) has for two decades been the
> classic text that professors assign to give graduate
> students an overview of modern literary criticism. 
> 
> But now the postmodernist giants  like Jacques
> Derrida and Roland Barthes  are over, he says. 
> 
> "The golden age of cultural theory is long past," Mr.
> Eagleton writes in his new book, "After Theory" (Basic
> Books), to be published in the United States in
> January. In this age of terrorism, he says, cultural
> theory has become increasingly irrelevant, because
> theorists have failed to address the big questions of
> morality, metaphysics, love, religion, revolution,
> death and suffering. 
> 
> Today graduate students and professors are bogged down
> in relativism, writing about sex and the body instead
> of the big issues. "On the wilder shores of academia,"
> he writes, "an interest in French philosophy has given
> way to a fascination with French kissing." 
> 
> His critique goes further. "The postmodern prejudice
> against norms, unities and consensuses is a
> politically catastrophic one," he writes. Cultural
> theorists can no longer "afford simply to keep
> recounting the same narratives of class, race and
> gender, indispensable as these topics are."
> 
> What Mr. Eagleton, one of the few remaining Marxist
> critics, wants now is a search for absolutes, for
> norms, for answers to what he calls "fundamental
> questions of truth and love in order to meet the
> urgencies of our global situation." 
> 
> [...]
> 
> He is unrepentant in his defense of Marxism, which, he
> writes, offers the blueprint for a moral society. For
> Marx, "questions of good and bad had been falsely
> abstracted from their social contexts, and had to be
> restored to them again," he writes, adding, "In this
> sense, Marx was a moralist in the classical sense of
> the word." 
> 
> [...]
> 
> The Marxist cultural historian Raymond Williams later
> became his intellectual mentor and got him a teaching
> position. 
> 
> [...]
> 
> Still, his work is shadowed by Roman Catholicism. Mr.
> Eagleton seems to find a confluence between his
> interpretation of Marxism and Christianity, in a
> shared ethic of cooperativism, and protection of the
> poor and the weak. He cites one of Paul's letters to
> the Corinthians: "God chose what is weakest in the
> world to shame the strong." Morality begins with a
> recognition of one's weakness and mortality, Mr.
> Eagleton says. He uses the example of King Lear, who
> is redeemed only after he has endured the storm on the
> heath and understands is own vulnerability. 
> 
> Although Mr. Eagleton remains vague about what his
> longed-for absolute truths would look like, he writes
> that an ethical society can only happen under
> socialism, "in which each attains his or her freedom
> and autonomy in and through the self-realization of
> others."
> 
> And he defends Marxists against the familiar litany of
> crimes. 
> 
> "If you want the most trenchant account of Stalinism
> you have to go to Marxism, not liberalism," he said.
> "Stalinism wasn't, from our point of view, radical
> enough. Long before Tiananmen Square the mainstream
> Marxists were saying the Soviet system is a travesty.
> You can't build Communism in backward conditions. You
> need international support. You need a society with a
> liberal democracy. Marx always saw socialism in
> continuity with middle-class democracy."
> 
> So what is his advice, specifically? "Get out of NATO.
> Get rid of capitalism. Put the economy back into
> public ownership."
> 
> Since 2001, Mr. Eagleton has been a professor of
> cultural theory at Manchester University, near where
> he grew up. He left Oxford after more than 30 years, a
> place he said he hated. In "The Gatekeeper" he refers
> to the faculty as "petulant, snobbish, spiteful,
> arrogant, autocratic and ferociously self-centered."
> 
> Still, Mr. Eagleton became involved with radical
> politics there and joined the Socialist Workers Party.
> He was known for his exuberant lectures, and organized
> an Irish singing group where his song on literary
> theory was born.
> 
> He said he left "with as much regret as if it were the
> day I went in."
> 
> Despite his new book, Mr. Eagleton said that the
> golden age of cultural theory was not all for naught.
> "We provided an important left intellectual core at a
> time when other things got more conservative," he
> said.
> 
> Yet what theorists have forgotten, he said, is the
> importance of the system to people's lives. "You need
> the satirist and the debunker," he said. "But you need
> constructive politics, too."
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/03/arts/03EAGL.html
> 
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
> http://photos.yahoo.com/