Literary Theory: An Introduction, and: Literature and Method: Towards a Critique of I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, and F. R. Leavis (review)

152 the minnesota review role models, as the pubUc replaces (and banishes) the private: I was not proud ofmy mother and father. I was embarrassed by thdr lack ofeducation . . . they were not like my teachers. (52) But I do not give voice to my parents by writing about thdr lives. I distinguish myself from them by writing about the Ufe we once shared. (186) I write today for a reader who exists in my mind only phantasmagoricaUy. Someone with a face erased; someone of no particular race or sex or age or weather. A gray presence. Unknown, unfamiliar. AU that I know about him is that he has had a long education and that his society, like mine, is often public (un gringo). (182) That reader is, ofcourse, the Other that he has created in his writing (188) but which has also "created" him, the writer (i.e., those in whose Symbolic—not image—he has evolved). Chapter by chapter he constructs that "gray" personage. He begins by celebrating the substantive and colorful Romantic image (intimacy, family, native language, complexion, outcastness, disadvantagedness, CathoUcism, etc.) only to subvert it and replace it with the Symbolic (the pubUc, school, English, middle class, Protestantism, etc.). Consumer culture has appropriated the private realm; there is only a poUtical pubUc realm in which to devdop one's personhood. This is indeed a cogent argument, one that goes beyond the traps of a bankrupt romanticized liberalism. The problem, however, is that Rodriguez's poUtical conclusions do not foUow from it: there is no reason why Spanish cannot also be a pubUc language; bilingual education does not have to serve the romantic function of preserving the intimate within the public, it can hdp a child to learn more readily; affirmative action is not meant to sympathize with the pUght of the disadvantaged but, rather, to give them some access to political power. GEORGE YUDICE Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Pp. viii + 244. $29.50 (doth); $9.95 (paper). Pamela McCaUum. Literature and Method: Towards a Critique of I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, andF. R. Leavis. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1983. Pp. 270. $42.00 (doth). When I. A. Richards went up to Cambridge a few years before the First World War, English literature did not yd exist. Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, and Johnson had written plays, poems, and novels, but in 1911, the Cambridge faculty had not yet recognized that thrirs and similar works made upa body of material worthy of systematic study. The most any aspiring student of his native literature could hope for—Richards was not one: he began to read history but switched in his first year to moral sdences under the tutelage of G. E. Moore—was to offer English literature as a spedai subject under the modern languages tripos. Less than a decade on from the war, things had changed dramatkaUy. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch by then occupied the King Edward VIl chair in English literature, and Richards himsdf was lecturing to Cambridge undergraduates on literary criticism and was reviews 153 supervising the research of postgraduate students on Uterary topics. Among the earnest redpients of the new Ph.D. in English at Cambridge was F. R. Leavis. On the eve of World War II, a young man from Wales, the son of a railway worker who had partidpated in the 1926 General Strike, went up to Cambridge to read English. His university studies were interrupted by service in a tank company in the British army, but he returned to Cambridge to complete his studies and would some years later be appointed to the chair in drama there. Raymond Williams has never felt entirely at home in Cambridge, least of all as a teacher of EngUsh literature, the subject he read as a student and which Cambridge, more than any other place, transformed into a systematic discipline. When Williams gave his final Cambridge lectures in spring 1983, he bid farewdl not only to his offirial post in the university, but to the entire tradition in EngUsh studies that has persisted in the Cambridge limelight more or less continuously since the 1920s. Terry Eagleton and...