First off, Eagleton is awesome. There were several points in his piece that he brought up great theorists and I half expected him to put himself into the mix as his style almost certainly requires. The reading makes the difficult simple, and makes fun of those who make the difficult difficult.
One part of the book that piqued my interest was the shift in what is an intellectual. I guess I had seen it throughout the semester changing from theology to philosophy, philosophy to science then become more specialized as summarized from Eagleton, but it hadn't hit as to how specialized our intellectual realms have become (80-1). Where at one point all wrote and thought about one subject, now there are schools of thought in different fields.
Is this a loss in theory as Eagleton has mentioned? Well, it certainly creates more jargon to sift through, but we do have dictionaries to help us with that. It also shows a decline in scholarship on specific subjects. But, overall it creates a wider range of studies that are focused on our culture - the one unifying concept to all specialized theories.
Because of this shift, we are able to allow ourselves to think and allow our thoughts to be, as Brecht says, "'a real sensuous pleasure"' (87). Theory, according to Eagleton, is meant to "illuminate" as well as "be illuminating;" therefore let us be specialized and illumine our culture (87).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
"overall it creates a wider range of studies that are focused on our culture - the one unifying concept to all specialized theories."
ReplyDeleteBut the entire text put culture up as a faux-center that distracted from the truth(re: history and Marxist class struggle), and created false divisions rather than unifying us. We have to work a lot harder before culture again functions as a unifying force beyond ever smaller more specifically defined groups.
I personally believe the strength of America is the diversity of her cultures. Granted, there are many incidents of bashing-but for all the faults Eagleton pointed out about Americans-I think he failed to recognize that culturally, we have achieved something very special in this country. Maybe that is something for him to ponder.
ReplyDeleteI didn't think it was so much scholarship but the types of things that people to choose to study. On one hand, I feel like Eagleton is pointing out the progressive shift toward a more materialistic culture, but on the other hand, I think that he finds this shift amusing and perhaps, necessary.
ReplyDeleteLinda Daly
ReplyDeleteEagleton seems to recognize that these various areas have been a necessary response to our new realities, as the years have clicked by, but he seems to feel that Marxism is really at the core of all of them in some manner and that only feminism has represented a great shift, even though he says Marxists made a concerted effort to include feminine concerns.