Fragments from “Literary Theory: an introduction” by Terry Eagleton

Apr 23, 2012 14:41

21.04

Quotes:[Spoiler (click to open)]
From The Rise of English (chapter 1)
Literature was in several ways a suitable candidate for this ideological
enterprise. As a liberal, 'humanizing' pursuit, it could provide a potent
antidote to political bigotry and ideological extremism. Since literature, as
we know, deals in universal human values rather than in such historical
trivia as civil wars, the oppression of women or the dispossession of the
English peasantry, it could serve to place in cosmic perspective the petty
demands of working people for decent living conditions or greater control
over their own lives, and might even with luck come to render them oblivious
of such issues in their high-minded contemplation of eternal truths and
beauties. English, as a Victorian handbook for English teachers put it, helps
to 'promote sympathy and fellow feeling among all classes'; another Victorian
writer speaks of literature as opening a 'serene and luminous region of
truth where all may meet and expatiate in common', above 'the smoke and
stir, the din and turmoil of man's lower life of care and business and debate'."
Literature would rehearse the masses in the habits of pluralistic thought and
feeling, persuading them to acknowledge that more than one viewpoint than
theirs existed namely, that of their masters. It would communicate to them
the moral riches of bourgeois civilization, impress upon them a reverence for
middle-class achievements, and, since reading is an essentially solitary, contemplative
activity, curb in them any disruptive tendency to collective political
action. It would give them a pride in their national language and
literature: if scanty education and extensive hours of labour prevented them
personally from producing a literary masterpiece, they could take pleasure in
the thought that others of their own kind - English people had done so.
The people, according to a study of English literature written in 1891, 'need
political culture, instruction, that is to say, in what pertains to their relation
to the State, to their duties as citizens; and they need also to be impressed
sentimentally by having the presentation in legend and history of heroic and
patriotic examples brought vividly and attractively before them'." All of
this, moreover, could be achieved without the cost and labour of teaching
them the Classics: English literature was written in their own language, and
so was conveniently available to them.
Like religion, literature works primarily by emotion and experience, and
so was admirably well-fitted to carry through the ideological task which
religion left off. Indeed by our own time literature has become effectively
identical with the opposite of analytical thought and conceptual enquiry:
whereas scientists, philosophers and political theorists are saddled with
these drably discursive pursuits, students of literature occupy the more
prized territory of feeling and experience. Whose experience, and what
kinds of feeling, is a different question. Literature from Arnold onwards is
the enemy of 'ideological dogma', an attitude which might have come as a
surprise to Dante, Milton and Pope; the truth or falsity of beliefs such as that
blacks are inferior to whites is less important than what it feels like to
experience them. Arnold himself had beliefs, of course, though like everybody
else he regarded his own beliefs as reasoned positions rather than
ideological dogmas. Even so, it was not the business ofliterature to communicate
such beliefs directly - to argue openly, for example, that private
property is the bulwark of liberty. Instead, literature should convey timeless
truths, thus distracting the masses from their immediate commitments,
nurturing in them a spirit of tolerance and generosity, and so ensuring the
survival of private property. Just as Arnold attempted in Literature and
Dogma and God and the Bible to dissolve away the embarrassingly doctrinal
bits of Christianity into poetically suggestive sonorities, so the pill of
middle-class ideology was to be sweetened by the sugar of literature.
There was another sense in which the 'experiential' nature of literature
was ideologically convenient. For 'experience' is not only the homeland of
ideology, the place where it takes root most effectively; it is also in its literary
form a kind of vicarious self-fulfilment. If you do not have the money and
leisure to visit the Far East, except perhaps as a soldier in the pay of British
imperialism, then you can always 'experience' it at second hand by reading
Conrad or Kipling. Indeed according to some literary theories this is even
more real than strolling round Bangkok. The actually impoverished experience
of the mass of people, an impoverishment bred by their social conditions,
can be supplemented by literature: instead of working to change such
conditions (which Arnold, to his credit, did more thoroughly than almost
any of those who sought to inherit his mantle), you can vicariously fulfil
someone's desire for a fuller life by handing them Pride and Prejudice.


[quotes], [quotes] books/non-fiction, #non-fiction, #essay, 2012: essay in english, 2012, book-2012 [essay], book-2012, @read in english, *author: male +academic, author: terry eagleton, +bookish

#non-fiction, [quotes] books/non-fiction, #essay, *author: male +academic, book-2012 [essay], 2012, book-2012, [quotes], 2012: essay in english, @read in english, author: terry eagleton, +bookish

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