The Career of Eagleton

James Smith The Career of Eagleton For those who are still most familiar with Terry Eagleton as either the brash young Althusserian theorist of Criticism and Ideology, the critic of the canon and institution of "English" in Literary Theory: An Introduction, the post-structural Marxist of Walter Benjamin, or the polemical intellectual historian of The Ideology ofAesthetic, the recent direction Eagleton's writing has taken would no doubtseem somewhat surprising. Over the past decade, he has written vicious denunciations of postmodernism and identity politics, offered a humanistic reconsideration of the idea of a "common culture," penned his memoir as well as a collection of plays, and most recently, produced a magisterial study of the concept of tragedy as it has occurred through Western history. Eagleton, it would seem, has become the man of belles letters that his earlier work so often attacked—as Colin McCabe has remarked, the critic that Eagleton now "most closely resembles is Samuel Johnson" (10), an image seemingly at odds with Eagleton's reputation as one of the foremost living Marxist intellectuals. Yet it would be a mistake to think that Eagleton's political commitment has softened. As he remarked in his recent memoir, The Gatekeeper, the sheer horror of such a cliché has prevented him, if nothing else has, from following such a path. Indeed, The Gatekeeper serves as a perfect example of Eagleton's literary practice. Eagleton takes what is perhaps the most indulgent and narcissistic of all literary forms—the autobiography—and slyly manipulates it, using it not so much as a medium for self promotion but rather as a witty, entertaining, provoking and argumentative political manifesto. It is, as Eagleton suggests, a work of "anti-autobiography," which "means not just not writing your autobiography, an astonishingly prevalent practice, but writing it in such a way as to outwit the prurience and immodesty of the genre by frustrating your own desire for self-display and the reader's desire to enter your inner life" (57). Eagleton playfully hints at aspects of his life, but refuses to be drawn into wholesale revelation, instead moving from amusing anecdotes about his life into wider political pronunciations without losing a beat. Thus, the discussion of Eagleton's experiences as a young gatekeeper at the local convent, where he watched young girls take the veil and retreat from the world into the isolation of life in the nunnery, provides the seed for discussions on teleology, the progress of history, and the state of contemporary capitalism. Descriptions of Eagleton's tutor at Trinity College, Dr. Greenway, turn into wider attacks on the privileged life of Oxbridge dons, the flaws of liberal pluralism, and the dass divisions of society. And the final chapter, beginning with Eagleton's encounters with the Royal family, ranges from anecdotes about the Scottish aristocracy, to Oscar Wilde, clichés in film scripts, and the death of his father while Eagleton was sitting the entrance examinations for Trinity College. 274 the minnesota review Eagleton's career has certainly had its share of controversy and criticism. His earliest work in the 60s in Slant, the journal of the Catholic Left, drew stern rebukes from the church hierarchy, while his appointment as Warton Professor of English at Oxford attracted hostile responses from the conservative British press, concerned with the induction of a trenchant Marxist into the professoriate of that venerable institution. He has even apparently been dubbed as "that dreadful Terry Eagleton" by Prince Charles, as Eagleton reports with delight in The Gatekeeper. Over the past decade, Eagleton's knack for raising hackles has by no means abated, as he has turned his pen to many concepts that current generations ofleftists hold dear, in his polemics against postmodernism and identity politics. The Illusions of Postmodernism is a sustained polemical rant against consumer-style postmodernist theory, boldly traversing the array of postmodern doxa without bothering to actually cite any of the theorists he is implicitly arguing against. Eagleton concedes the limitations of the work in the introduction: "I have in mind," he states, "less the higher philosophical flights of the subject than what a particular kind of student today is likely to believe"(viii), and he tackles a range...