never mind the bullocks, here's Terry Eagleton.
I don't want to talk about my mother's condition right now. I went home to bathe and sleep. Did the former and found out that I'm so stressed I couldn't do the latter, so I'm doing the next best thing: sharing some very nice quotes from Terry Eagleton!
I remember something my professor in CL 122 (Contemporary Literary Criticism) said a decade ago: to properly read and annotate an essay, one must read it three times. The first reading is for basic comprehension, the second is for underlining important quotations, and only on the third can one truly begin to fully grasp -- enough to critique -- another thinker's text.
Some may say that's pure academic snobbishness, but hey, if you have the time to waste why not. There isn't much to do in an ICU waiting room. Besides, something about fandom right now is making me want to read literary criticism again. Hence the Eco and the Eagleton, and a couple of other stuff on my bookshelf I haven't so much cracked open in a decade.
I picked up my beautiful hardbound edition of Eagleton's "After Theory" (2003) during my last trip to the US. It was such a lovely buy -- on sale for 12 dollars, when it's list price is 25 dollars (ironic, how actual value and price do not match. The Marxist in Eagleton must find be amused/bemused.) When I first devoured it, I felt he was so disillusioned and hey, maybe he's getting old but at least he's found his sense of humor. I can't remember him being this funny before.
But while re-reading it at the hospital, I went on a fangirl squee. No! I was wrong! He isn't disillusioned! And yes, he's still funny! For a moment there, I thought maybe reading it while visiting in the Northern Hemisphere affected my sense of humor.
Hesitating just a bit, I pulled out my fountain pen and started underlining the acid-free paper. Waah. Such desecration, I know, but what can I do? This is actually the first Eagleton I properly own -- all my readings in college were sad little photocopies... including my copy of "Literary Theory: An Introduction." Buhuhuhu.
Enough digression. Here are some quotes from the first four chapters.
Those to whom the title of this book suggests that 'theory' is now over, and that we can all relievedly return to an age of pre-theoretical innocence, are in for a disappointment. There can be no going back to an age when it was enough to pronounce Keats delectable or Milton a doughty spirit. p.1
Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics they were. What is sexy instead is sex.... Socialism has lost out to sado-masochism. p.2
The advent of sexuality and popular culture as kosher subjects for study has put paid to one powerful myth. It helped to demolish the puritan dogma that seriousness is one thing and pleasure another.... Pleasure falls outside the realm of knowledge, and thus is dangerously anarchic. On this view, to study pleasure would be like chemically analysing champagne rather than drinking the stuff....
Yet pleasure, a buzz word for contemporary culture, has its limits too. Finding out how to make life more pleasant is not always pleasant. Like all scientific inquiry, it requires patience, self-discipline and an inexhaustible capacity to be bored. p. 5
Margins can be unspeakably painful places to be, and there are few more honourable tasks for students of culture than to help create a space in which the dumped and disregarded can find a tongue. p.13
It was majorities, not minorities, which confrounded imperial power in India and brought down apartheid.... The postmodern prejudice against norms, unities and consensuses is a politically catastrophic one. It is also remarkably dim-witted. p. 15-16
In principle, however, capitalism is an impeccably inclusive creed: it really doesn't care who it exploits. It is admirably egalitarian in its readiness to do down just about anyone. It is prepared to rub shoulders with any old victim, however unappetizing. Most of the time, at least, it is eager to mix together as many diverse cultures as possible, so that it can peddle its commodities to them all. p. 19
For a socialist, the true scandal of the present world is that almost everyone in it is banished to the margins. p. 19
There is nothing retrograde about roots. The postmodern cult of the migrant, which sometimes succeeds in making migrants sound even more enviable than rock stars, is a good deal too supercilious in this respect. It is a hangover from the modernist cult of the exile, the Satanic artist who scorns the suburbian masses and plucks an elitist virtue out of his enforced dispossession. The problem of the moment is that the rich have mobility while the poor have locality. p. 21-22
---> I don't particularly agree with this quote, but it's still interesting. Why don't I agree? Because in the context of the Philippine experience, migration is due to economic need. It's interesting to note that the government hails overseas workers as "new heroes" because the dollars sent home buoys up the national economy more than any local industry.
Cultural theory was there to remind the traditional left of what it had flouted: art, pleasure, gender, power, sexuality, language, madness, desire, spirituality, ethnicity, life-style, hegemony. This, on any estimate, was a sizable slice of human existence. p. 30
Western Marxism's shift to culture was born partially out of political impotence and disenchantment. Caught between capitalism and Stalinism, groups like the Frankfurt School could compensate for their political homelessness by turning to cultural and philosophical questions. Politically marooned, they could draw upon their formidable cultural resources to confront a capitalism in which the role of culture was becoming more and more vital, and thus prove themselves once more politically relevant. p.31
Marxism had been largely silent on the environment, but so at the time had almost everyone else. p.31
---> HAHAHAHA!!! In hindsight it's so easy to say this, but man, I had such a hard time searching for my fellow environmentally-conscious Marxists. It took me years. Seriously, I would have spontaneously orgasmed if Eagleton said this in an essay a decade ago.... wait. Sorry. Too much information.
It is true, even so, that the Communist movement had been culpably silent on some central questions.... [but] It is not a deficiency of Marxism that it has nothing very interesting to say about whether physical exercise or wiring your jaws together is the best way of dieting. Nor is it a defect of feminism that it has so far remained silent about the Bermuda Triangle. Some of those who upbraid Marxism with not saying enough are also allergic to grand narratives which try to say too much. p. 33-34
There were times when it was well-nigh impossible to tell whether the finest cultural thinker of post-war Britain, Raymond Williams, was a Marxist or not. p. 35
---> I know. The man is friggin' nuts. Raymond Williams is ♥
Feminism is a fairly loose collection of beliefs, but however loose it is it cannot include workshipping men as a superior species. p.36
---> This quote reminded me of a sexist pig from BA. Mwahahahahaha.
Man, I'm only up to page 39 (chapter two) and I'm already exhausted from typing. Maybe I should make make this a multi-post project.
In the meantime, let me end on with this particular nugget of brilliance:
Sheer pointlessness is a deeply subversive affair.
I remember something my professor in CL 122 (Contemporary Literary Criticism) said a decade ago: to properly read and annotate an essay, one must read it three times. The first reading is for basic comprehension, the second is for underlining important quotations, and only on the third can one truly begin to fully grasp -- enough to critique -- another thinker's text.
Some may say that's pure academic snobbishness, but hey, if you have the time to waste why not. There isn't much to do in an ICU waiting room. Besides, something about fandom right now is making me want to read literary criticism again. Hence the Eco and the Eagleton, and a couple of other stuff on my bookshelf I haven't so much cracked open in a decade.
I picked up my beautiful hardbound edition of Eagleton's "After Theory" (2003) during my last trip to the US. It was such a lovely buy -- on sale for 12 dollars, when it's list price is 25 dollars (ironic, how actual value and price do not match. The Marxist in Eagleton must find be amused/bemused.) When I first devoured it, I felt he was so disillusioned and hey, maybe he's getting old but at least he's found his sense of humor. I can't remember him being this funny before.
But while re-reading it at the hospital, I went on a fangirl squee. No! I was wrong! He isn't disillusioned! And yes, he's still funny! For a moment there, I thought maybe reading it while visiting in the Northern Hemisphere affected my sense of humor.
Hesitating just a bit, I pulled out my fountain pen and started underlining the acid-free paper. Waah. Such desecration, I know, but what can I do? This is actually the first Eagleton I properly own -- all my readings in college were sad little photocopies... including my copy of "Literary Theory: An Introduction." Buhuhuhu.
Enough digression. Here are some quotes from the first four chapters.
Those to whom the title of this book suggests that 'theory' is now over, and that we can all relievedly return to an age of pre-theoretical innocence, are in for a disappointment. There can be no going back to an age when it was enough to pronounce Keats delectable or Milton a doughty spirit. p.1
Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics they were. What is sexy instead is sex.... Socialism has lost out to sado-masochism. p.2
The advent of sexuality and popular culture as kosher subjects for study has put paid to one powerful myth. It helped to demolish the puritan dogma that seriousness is one thing and pleasure another.... Pleasure falls outside the realm of knowledge, and thus is dangerously anarchic. On this view, to study pleasure would be like chemically analysing champagne rather than drinking the stuff....
Yet pleasure, a buzz word for contemporary culture, has its limits too. Finding out how to make life more pleasant is not always pleasant. Like all scientific inquiry, it requires patience, self-discipline and an inexhaustible capacity to be bored. p. 5
Margins can be unspeakably painful places to be, and there are few more honourable tasks for students of culture than to help create a space in which the dumped and disregarded can find a tongue. p.13
It was majorities, not minorities, which confrounded imperial power in India and brought down apartheid.... The postmodern prejudice against norms, unities and consensuses is a politically catastrophic one. It is also remarkably dim-witted. p. 15-16
In principle, however, capitalism is an impeccably inclusive creed: it really doesn't care who it exploits. It is admirably egalitarian in its readiness to do down just about anyone. It is prepared to rub shoulders with any old victim, however unappetizing. Most of the time, at least, it is eager to mix together as many diverse cultures as possible, so that it can peddle its commodities to them all. p. 19
For a socialist, the true scandal of the present world is that almost everyone in it is banished to the margins. p. 19
There is nothing retrograde about roots. The postmodern cult of the migrant, which sometimes succeeds in making migrants sound even more enviable than rock stars, is a good deal too supercilious in this respect. It is a hangover from the modernist cult of the exile, the Satanic artist who scorns the suburbian masses and plucks an elitist virtue out of his enforced dispossession. The problem of the moment is that the rich have mobility while the poor have locality. p. 21-22
---> I don't particularly agree with this quote, but it's still interesting. Why don't I agree? Because in the context of the Philippine experience, migration is due to economic need. It's interesting to note that the government hails overseas workers as "new heroes" because the dollars sent home buoys up the national economy more than any local industry.
Cultural theory was there to remind the traditional left of what it had flouted: art, pleasure, gender, power, sexuality, language, madness, desire, spirituality, ethnicity, life-style, hegemony. This, on any estimate, was a sizable slice of human existence. p. 30
Western Marxism's shift to culture was born partially out of political impotence and disenchantment. Caught between capitalism and Stalinism, groups like the Frankfurt School could compensate for their political homelessness by turning to cultural and philosophical questions. Politically marooned, they could draw upon their formidable cultural resources to confront a capitalism in which the role of culture was becoming more and more vital, and thus prove themselves once more politically relevant. p.31
Marxism had been largely silent on the environment, but so at the time had almost everyone else. p.31
---> HAHAHAHA!!! In hindsight it's so easy to say this, but man, I had such a hard time searching for my fellow environmentally-conscious Marxists. It took me years. Seriously, I would have spontaneously orgasmed if Eagleton said this in an essay a decade ago.... wait. Sorry. Too much information.
It is true, even so, that the Communist movement had been culpably silent on some central questions.... [but] It is not a deficiency of Marxism that it has nothing very interesting to say about whether physical exercise or wiring your jaws together is the best way of dieting. Nor is it a defect of feminism that it has so far remained silent about the Bermuda Triangle. Some of those who upbraid Marxism with not saying enough are also allergic to grand narratives which try to say too much. p. 33-34
There were times when it was well-nigh impossible to tell whether the finest cultural thinker of post-war Britain, Raymond Williams, was a Marxist or not. p. 35
---> I know. The man is friggin' nuts. Raymond Williams is ♥
Feminism is a fairly loose collection of beliefs, but however loose it is it cannot include workshipping men as a superior species. p.36
---> This quote reminded me of a sexist pig from BA. Mwahahahahaha.
Man, I'm only up to page 39 (chapter two) and I'm already exhausted from typing. Maybe I should make make this a multi-post project.
In the meantime, let me end on with this particular nugget of brilliance:
Sheer pointlessness is a deeply subversive affair.