• "What Is Literature?" Eagleton explores several possible answers:

• And so Eagleton's preliminary conclusion: "There is no 'essence' of literature whatsoever. Any bit of writing may be read 'non-pragmatically', if that is what reading a text as literature means, just as any writing may be read 'poetically'" (8).

• Eagleton's (more adamant) Conclusion: "the suggestion that 'literature' is a highly valued kind of writing is an illuminating one. But it has one fairly devastating consequence. It means that we can drop once and for all the illusion that the category 'literature' is 'objective', in the sense of being eternally given and immutable. Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature—Shakespeare, for example—can cease to be literature. . . . Literature, in the sense of a set of works of assured and unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist" (9).

• As a Marxist, Eagleton has steered this entire introductory chapter to his main thesis, that "Literature" is, and is all about, IDEOLOGY (12-14), which he first defines as "that fundamental structure of beliefs and interests which I am born into as a member of a particular society" (12), then as the "largely concealed structure of values which informs and underlies our factual statements"—especially "those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power" (13).

• In conclusion: "If it will not do to see literature as an 'objective', descriptive category, neither will it do to say that literature is just what people whimsically choose to call literature. For there is nothing at all whimsical about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their roots in deeper structures of belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the Empire State building. What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements themselves have a close relation to social ideologies. They refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others" (14)

• This chapter on the history of the origins of English as an academic discipline expressly aims at demonstrating Eagleton's central thesis that not only literature, but literary studies, has always been a political animal.

• Romanticism (late 18th c./early 19th c.): "It was, in fact, only with what we now call the 'Romantic period' that our own definitions of literature began to develop. The modern sense of the word 'literature' only really gets under way in the nineteenth century, Literature in this sense of the word is an historically recent phenomenon: it was invented sometime around the turn of the eighteenth century"—and it had a specific political rationale, however buried that was in poetry about birds, flowers, and dear, dear sisters: "'Poetry' comes to mean a good deal more than verse: by the time of Shelley's Defence of Poetry (1821), it signifies a concept of human creativity which is radically at odds with the utilitarian ideology of early industrial capitalist England." Moreover, much of this mythos built around poetry and poetic inspiration & genius and "Imagination" with a capital "I" lives on to this day: "Since we ourselves are post-Romantics, in the sense of being products of that epoch rather than confidently posterior to it, it is hard for us to grasp just what a curious historically particular idea this is [i.e., the 'Imagination']" (16).

• Therefore—Eagleton's main thesis again: "Literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology. It has the most intimate relations to questions of social power. But if the reader is still unconvinced, the narrative of what happened to literature in the later nineteenth century might prove a little more persuasive" (19-20).

• Key subthesis: Eagleton's "single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century" is "'the failure of religion'. By the mid-Victorian period, this traditionally reliable, immensely powerful ideological form was in deep trouble. It was no longer winning the hearts and minds of the masses, and under the twin impacts of scientific discovery and social change its previous unquestioned dominance was in danger of evaporating. This was particularly worrying for the Victorian ruling class, because religion is for all kinds of reasons an extremely effective form of ideological control." Religion supplied "an excellent social 'cement'"; it was a "pacifying influence" (20). [There is an obvious Marxist reason why this is so: we can't have them "imagining there's no heaven"!—or they'll see no reward in being wage slaves for their whole lives in this world, this mere "veil of tears."]

• In the early 20th century, then, "literature becomes more than just a handmaiden of moral ideology: it is moral ideology for the modern age"—as Eagleton's lengthy discussion of the (socio-historical background leading to the rise of) British humanist-moral critic F. R. Leavis demonstrates (24). . . . [Later:] "Literature . . . was important because it was nothing less than a whole social ideology" (32).

• Leavis himself now, and his literary journal Scrutiny: "Scrutiny was the title of the critical journal launched in 1932 by the Leavises, which has yet to be surpassed in its tenacious devotion to the moral centrality of English studies, their crucial relevance to the quality of social life as a whole." It tried to replace dilettantism with a seriousness study of its topic: "In the face of such whimsical 'taste', they stressed the centrality of rigorous critical analysis, a disciplined attention to the 'words on the page'. They urged this not simply for technical or aesthetic reasons, but because it had the closest relevance to the spiritual crisis of modern civilization. Literature was important not only in itself, but because it encapsulated creative energies which were everywhere on the defensive in modern 'commercial' society" (27-28). Indeed: "To be a certain kind of English student in Cambridge in the late 1920s and 1930s was to be caught up in this buoyant, polemical onslaught against the most trivializing features of industrial capitalism. It was rewarding to know that being an English student was not only valuable but the most important way of life one could imagine[!]—that one was contributing in one's own modest way to rolling back twentieth-century society in the direction of the 'organic' community of seventeenth-century England, that one moved at the most progressive tip of civilization itself" (28).

• The towering figure of Anglo-American modernism, T. S. Eliot: Eliot's own privileging of the Metaphysical poets (the most famous of whom were "conservative Anglicans"), the French Symbolistes, etc., was yet another "whole political reading of English history." (Milton was spurned as a "puritan revolutionary" [33]!) Romanticism had ruined English Lit. with too much "personality" and emotionalism and other "anarchic doctrines of a society which had lost collective belief and declined into an errant individualism. It was not until the appearance of T. S. Eliot that English literature began to recuperate[!]" (34). (Later, the Imagists, too, favored "laconic" verse, since "[e]motions were messy and suspect" [36]!) "Eliot's own solution is an extreme right-wing authoritarianism: men and women must sacrifice their petty 'personalities' and opinions to an impersonal order. In the sphere of literature, this impersonal order is the Tradition." [Not surprisingly, Eliot and other Modernists like him have been dubbed a new version of Neo-Classicism.] "Like any other literary tradition, Eliot's is in fact a highly selective affair: indeed its governing principle seems to be not so much which works of the past are eternally valuable, as which will help T. S. Eliot to write his own poetry[!]" (34).

• New Criticism—By way of segue: Leavis was also/already associated with "close reading." What this meant is "hat you could judge literary 'greatness' and 'centrality' by bringing a focused attentiveness to bear on poems or pieces of prose isolated from their cultural and historical contexts" (37). "There was no need There was no need to examine the work in its historical context, or even discuss the structure of ideas on which it drew. It was a matter of assessing the tone and sensibility of a particular passage, 'placing' it definitively and then moving on to the next. [Another great zinger of a sentence:] It is not clear how this procedure was more than just a more rigorous form of wine-tasting, given that what the literary impressionists might call 'blissful' you might call 'maturely robust'" (37-38). (Thus the New Critics would at least attempt more analytical rigor in their "close reading.")

• The final section on William Empson feels a bit afterthoughtish, since Eagleton finds him rather uncategorizable. For one thing, his study of "ambiguity"—while also a favorite buzzword of New Criticism—suggests ways of reading that anticipate poststructuralism?: "Empsonian ambiguities, on the other hand, can never be finally pinned down: they indicate points where the poem's language falters, trails off or gestures beyond itself, pregnantly suggestive of some potentially inexhaustible context of meaning." Or even reader-response theory?: "an ambiguity as Empson defined it is 'any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language'. It is the reader's response which makes for ambiguity, and this response depends on more than the poem alone" (45). Finally, "Empson sees that the meanings of a literary text are always in some measure promiscuous, never reducible to a final interpretation"; and in the opposition between his 'ambiguity' and New Critical 'ambivalence' we find a kind of early pre-run of the debate between structuralists and post-structuralists which we shall explore later" (46).

• Of course: "There is . . . no need to drag politics into literary theory: as with South African sport, it has been there from the beginning. I mean by the political no more than the way we organize our social life together, and the power-relations which this involves; and what I have tried to show throughout this book is that the history of modern literary theory is part of the political and ideological history of our epoch. From Percy Bysshe Shelley to Norman N. Holland, literary theory has been indissociably bound up with political beliefs and ideological values" (169-170).

• A Return to the Intro: "I began this book by arguing that literature did not exist. How in that case can literary theory exist either? There are two familiar ways in which any theory can provide itself with a distinct purpose and identity. Either it can define itself in terms of its particular methods of enquiry; or it can define itself in terms of the particular object that is being enquired into [that is, "Literature," which Eagleton has already dismantled]. Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure. Literary theory is supposed to reflect on the nature of literature and literary criticism. But just think of how many methods are involved in literary criticism. You can discuss the poet's asthmatic childhood, or examine her peculiar use of syntax; you can detect the rustling of silk in the hissing of the s's, explore the phenomenology of reading, relate the literary work to the state of the class-struggle or find out how many copies it sold. These methods have nothing whatsoever of significance in common. In fact they have more in common with other 'disciplines'—linguistics, history, sociology and so on—than they have with each other. Methodologically speaking, literary criticism is a non-subject. If literary theory is a kind of 'metacriticism', a critical reflection on criticism, then it follows that it too is a non-subject" (171-172).

• "[W]hat is at issue in the contention between different literary theories or 'non-theories' are competing ideological strategies related to the very destiny of English studies in modern society. The problem with literary theory is that it can neither beat nor join the dominant ideologies of late industrial capitalism" (174). . . . "Liberal humanism has dwindled to the impotent conscience of bourgeois society, gentle, sensitive and ineffectual; structuralism has already more or less vanished into the literary museum" (174; this last may be an overstatement?!).

• "Departments of literature in higher education, then, are part of the ideological apparatus of the modern capitalist state. They are not wholly reliable apparatuses, since for one thing the humanities contain many values, meanings and traditions which are antithetical to that state's social priorities, which are rich in kinds of wisdom and experience beyond its comprehension. For another thing, if you allow a lot of young people to do nothing for a few years but read books and talk to each other then it is possible that, given certain wider historical circumstances, they will not only begin to question some of the values transmitted to them but begin to interrogate the authority by which they are transmitted" (174-175)!

• Also, critical theory now engages in "any kind of writing"; "If you have nothing better to do at a party you can always try on a literary critical analysis of it, speak of its styles and genres, discriminate its significant nuances or formalize its sign-systems. Such a 'text' can prove quite as rich as one of the canonical works, and critical dissections of it quite as ingenious as those of Shakespeare. So either literary criticism confesses that it can handle parties just as well as it can Shakespeare, in which case it is in danger of losing its identity along with its object; or it agrees that parties may be interestingly analysed provided that this is called something else: ethnomethodology or hermeneutical phenomenology, perhaps. Its own concern is with literature, because literature is more valuable and rewarding than any of the other texts on which the critical discourse might operate. The disadvantage of this claim is that it is plainly untrue: many films and works of philosophy are considerably more valuable than much that is included in the 'literary canon.'" In fact, "Shakespeare was not great literature lying conveniently to hand, which the literary institution then happily discovered: he is great literature because the institution constitutes him as such. This does not mean that he is not 'really' great literature—that it is just a matter of people's opinions about him—because there is no such thing as literature which is 'really' great, or 'really' anything, independently of the ways in which that writing is treated within specific forms of social and institutional life" (176).

•So what shall we do?: "to recognize that literary theory is an illusion too" may be the "best possible thing . . . to do"! "We must conclude, then, that this book is less an introduction than an obituary, and that we have ended by burying the object we sought to unearth" (178).

• And so—your Marxism, now?: "My intention, in other words, is not to counter the literary theories I have critically examined in this book with a literary theory of my own, which would claim to be more politically acceptable. Any reader who has been expectantly waiting for a Marxist theory has obviously not been reading this book with due attention. There are indeed Marxist and feminist theories of literature, which in my opinion are more valuable than any of the theories discussed here" (178)!

• Eagleton's ultimate call is for a new "Cultural Studies": "The point is whether it is possible to speak of 'literary theory' without perpetuating the illusion that literature exists as a distinct, bounded object of knowledge, or whether it is not preferable to draw the practical consequences of the fact that literary theory can handle Bob Dylan just as well as John Milton. My own view is that it is most useful to see 'literature' as a name which people give from time to time for different reasons to certain kinds of writing within a whole field of what Michel Foucault has called 'discursive practices', and the [sic] if anything is to be an object of study it is this whole field of practices rather than just those sometimes rather obscurely labelled 'literature'. I am countering the theories set out in this book not with a literary theory, but with a different kind of discourse—whether one calls it of 'culture', 'signifying practices' or whatever is not of first importance—which would include the objects ('literature') with which these other theories deal, but which would transform them by setting them in a wider context" (178).

• Despite his claim that he won't be preaching Marxism here, Eagleton then slams liberal humanism again, as complicit in the "system": "Its view of individual freedom is similarly abstract: the freedom of any particular individual is crippled and parasitic as long as it depends on the futile labour and active oppression of others. Literature may protest against such conditions or it may not, but it is only possible in the first place because of them. As the German critic Walter Benjamin put it: 'There is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism'" (181).

• Likewise (and not surprisingly), Eagleton has little time for a retreat to aestheticism: "The Romantic opposition to the utilitarian ideology of capitalism has made 'use' an unusable word: for the aesthetes, the glory of art is its utter uselessness" (181; compare this to Kant's "purposiveness-without-a-purpose").

• "Every literary theory presupposes a certain use of literature, even if what you get out of it is its utter uselessness. Liberal humanist criticism is not wrong to use literature, but wrong to deceive itself that it does not. It uses it to further certain moral values, which as I hope to have shown are in fact indissociable from certain ideological ones, and in the end imply a particular form of politics" (182).

• In defense of FEMINISM & MARXISM: "The feminist critic is not studying representations of gender simply because she believes that this will further her political ends. She also believes that gender and sexuality are central themes in literature and other sorts of discourse, and that any critical account which suppresses them is seriously defective. Similarly, the socialist critic does not see literature in terms of ideology or class-struggle because these happen to be his or her political interests, arbitrarily projected on to literary works. He or she would hold that such matters are the very stuff of history, and that in so far as literature is an historical phenomenon, they are the very stuff of literature too" (182). . . . "Socialist and feminist critics are quite at one with them [liberal humanists] on this: it is just that they wish to point out that" the "deepening and enriching" of life that literature provides also "entails the transformation of a society divided by class and gender" (183).

• CULTURAL STUDIES encore: Eagleton now asks "how the reinvention of rhetoric that I have proposed (though it might equally as well be called 'discourse theory' or 'cultural studies' or whatever) might contribute to making us all better people. Discourses, sign-systems and signifying practices of all kinds, from film and television to fiction and the languages of natural science, produce effects, shape forms of consciousness and unconsciousness, which are closely related to the maintenance or transformation of our existing systems of power. They are thus closely related to what it means to be a person. Indeed 'ideology' can be taken to indicate no more than this connection—the link or nexus between discourses and power" (183).

• In Eagleton's new Department of Cultural Studies, "Such a strategy obviously has far-reaching institutional implications. It would mean, for example, that departments of literature as we presently know them in higher education would cease to exist" (185). . . . Whatever would in the long term replace such departments—and the proposal is a modest one, for such experiments are already under way in certain areas of higher education—would centrally involve education in the various theories and methods of cultural analysis. The fact that such education is not routinely provided by many existing departments of literature, or is provided 'optionally' or marginally, is one of their most scandalous and farcical features. (Perhaps their other most scandalous and farcical feature is the largely wasted energy which postgraduate students are required to pour into obscure, often spurious research topics in order to produce dissertations which are frequently no more than sterile academic exercises, and which few others will ever read.)" (186)!

• Eagleton then identifies FOUR major contemporary "moments"—or areas, or avenues—for such criticism:

• In Conclusion: "These areas are not alternatives to the study of Shakespeare and Proust. If the study of such writers could become as charged with energy, urgency and enthusiasm as the activities I have just reviewed, the literary institution ought to rejoice rather than complain. But it is doubtful that this will happen when such texts are hermetically sealed from history, subjected to a sterile critical formalism, piously swaddled with eternal verities and used to confirm prejudices which any moderately enlightened student can perceive to be objectionable. The liberation of Shakespeare and Proust from such controls may well entail the death of literature, but it may also be their redemption" (188-189).

• And then a very odd final "ALLEGORY": "I shall end with an allegory. We know that the lion is stronger than the lion-tamer, and so does the lion-tamer. The problem is that the lion does not know it. It is not out of the question that the death of literature may help the lion to awaken" (189; Of course it's only odd if one hasn't followed Eagleton's own politics thruout the book! [Note, also, that these are the last sentences of the original edition.]).

• P.S.: As Eagleton reminds us in the Afterword, this chapter was written "way back" in 1982, and obviously his call or/prediction of English's transformation (in large part) into "Cultural Studies" has happened. (And see our own course text, The Cultural Studies Reader.) In the 1990's, for instance, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" studies, etc., became fairly popular. Moreover, Eagleton seems to conveniently have forgotten that, in his own Great Britain, the neo-Marxist pop-culture-centric Birmingham School of Cultural Studies had been running since the 1960s.

• A decade and a half later, Eagleton can look back at the "times" he was describing with more distance, especially that social ferment that was the late 1960's (of student protests, the Vietnam War, et al.): "the late 1960s and early 1970s was a period in which new social forces were consolidating, certain global struggles (such as revolutionary nationalism) were intensifying, and a new, more heterogeneous body of students and teachers was flooding into academia from backgrounds which sometimes put them at odds with its governing consensus. Unusually, then, the campuses themselves became for a time hotbeds of political conflict; and this oubreak of militancy coincided in the late 1960s with the first emergence of literary theory. The first pathbreaking works of Jacques Derrida appeared just as French students were gearing themselves up for a confrontation with state power. . . . [N]either was it quite so easy to take for granted the liberal disinterestedness of academia itself, in an era when, not least in the Vietnam adventure, the Western universities themselves seemed increasingly locked into structures of social power, ideological control and military violence" (191).

• CULTURAL STUDIES encore: "The children of the sixties and seventies were also the inheritors of so-called popular culture, which was part of what they were required to put in suspension when studying Jane Austen. But structuralism had apparently revealed that the same codes and conventions traversed both 'high' and 'low' culture, with scant regard for classical distinctions of value; so why not seize advantage of the fact that, methodologically speaking, nobody quite knew where Coriolanus ended and Coronation Street [a Brit soap opera] began and construct an entirely fresh field of enquiry ('cultural studies') which would gratify the anti-elitist iconoclasm of the sixty-eighters and yet appear wholly in line with 'scientific' theoretical findings?" (192).

• But then a conservative backlash (think "the Reagan years"): "Much of this rather brash theoretical buoyancy was soon to be dispersed" (192). . . . "What happened in the event was not a defeat for this project [of radical Cultural Studies/critical theory], which has indeed been gathering institutional strength ever since, but a defeat for the political forces which originally underpinned the new evolutions in literary theory. The student movement was rolled back, finding the political system too hard to break. The momentum of national liberation movements throughout the Third World slackened in the early 1970s . . . . Social democracy in the West, apparently unable to cope with the mounting problems of a capitalism in severe crisis, gave way to political regimes of a distinctly right-wing tenor, whose aim was not simply to combat radical values but to wipe them from living memory. By the close of the 1970s, Marxist criticism was rapidly falling from favour, as the world capitalist system, with its back to the economic wall since the oil crisis of the early 1970s, aggressively confronted Third World revolutionary nationalism abroad, and at home launched a series of virulent onslaughts on the labour movement and the forces of the left, along with liberal or enlightened thought in general. As if all this were not enough, the Almighty, evidently displeased with cultural theory, stepped in and picked off Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan" (192-193)!!

• FEMINISM encore: "What held the fort of political criticism was feminism, which had rapidly come into its own; and it is no accident that this was also the heyday of post-structuralism. For though post-structuralism has its radical wing, its politics have been on the whole somewhat muted and oblique, and so more in keeping with a post-radical age." (However, Eagleton later qualifies this: "Post-stucturalism is in many respects a much more subversive project" than its fate, its practice, in American universities [193]—where, it can be argued, it rather became just a "hipper" version of New Criticism?!)

• But—MARXISM?: "The same can hardly be said of Marxist criticism, which since its apogee in the mid-1970s has languished somewhat in the doldrums. [An important fact:] This waning of Marxism long pre-dated the momentous events of the late 1980s in Eastern Europe, when neo-Stalinism, to the relief of all democratic socialists, was finally overthrown by just the kind of popular revolutions which Western postmodernism had complacently concluded were no longer either possible or desirable. Since this event was one which mainstream currents of the Western Marxist left had been clamouring for for a good seventy years, it was hardly an abrupt disillusionment with 'actually existing socialism' in the East which caused the decline of Marxist criticism in the West." (In sum, Western Marxism had long disassociated itself from the totalitarian regimes of Stalin & Mao.) "The fading popularity of Marxist criticism from the 1970s onwards was the result of developments in the so-called First World, not in the so-called Second. It stemmed in part from the crisis of global capitalism which we have glanced at already, in part from the criticisms aimed at Marxism by the various 'new' political currents—feminism, gay rights, ecology, ethnic movements and the rest" (195; hmmm; wow; perhaps THE sentence in this book that I most disagree with).

• Other Crit-Theory Trends: "As the 1980s wore on, then, Michel Foucault rapidly overtook Karl Marx as the doyen of political theory, while Freud, as cryptically re-interpreted by Jacques Lacan, was still riding high." (As anticipated by my comment about American poststructuralism above, Derrida gets watered down/tamed:) "In the hands of some of his Anglo-Saxon disciples [i.e., the Yale School], deconstruction was reduced to a narrowly textual form of enquiry, lending a boost to the literary canon it offered to subvert by roaming ceaselessly over its contents, deconstructing as it went and so keeping the critical industry well supplied with sophisticated new materials[!]. Derrida himself has always insisted on the political, historical, institutional nature of his project; but this, transplanted from Paris to Yale or Cornell, tended like the odd French wine not to travel well[!], and this audacious, iconoclastic thought-form proved easily assimilable to a formalist paradigm. On the whole, post-structuralism in general thrived best when it blended some broader project: feminism, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis" (196).

• New Historicism (which might be called a footnote to Foucault!): "[T]hroughout the 1980s, not least in the United States, there had been a gathering swell floating literary theory back in the direction of some brand of historicism. In changed political circumstances, however, this could no longer be the apparently discredited historicism of Marx or Hegel, with its supposed faith in grand, unitary narratives, its teleological hopes, its hierarchy of historical causes, its realist faith in determining the truth of historical events, its assured distinctions between what was central and what peripheral in history itself. What emerged on the scene in the 1980s, with the so-called new historicism, was a style of historical criticism which revolved precisely on the rejection of all of these doctrines. It was a historiography appropriate for a postmodern age in which the very notions of historical truth, causality, pattern, purpose and direction were increasingly under fire" (197).

• "Postmodernism": "[I]t is doubtless the most widely-touted term in cultural theory today, one which, in promising to cover everything from Madonna to meta-narrative, post-Fordism to pulp fiction, threatens thereby to collapse into meaninglessness. We can, first of all, distinguish the more comprehensive, historical or philosophical term 'postmodernity' from the narrow, more cultural or aesthetic term 'postmodernism'. Postmodernity means the end of modernity, in the sense of those grand narratives of truth, reason, science, progress and universal emancipation which are taken to characterize modern thought from the Enlightenment onwards" (200; others take this previous era of "modernity" back to the Renaissance). Modernity entailed "the dangerously absolutist faith that our varied, contingent forms of life and knowledge can be grounded in some single, ultimate, unimpeachable principle: Reason or the laws of history, technology or modes of production, political Utopia [as in Marxism!?] or a universal human nature. For 'anti-foundationalist' postmodernity, by contrast, our forms of life are relative, ungrounded, self-sustaining, made up of mere cultural convention and tradition, without any identifiable origin or grandiose goal" (201).

• POCO Theory: "If, by the mid-1990s, feminist criticism has proved the most popular of the various new literary approaches, then post-colonial theory has been pressing hard on its heels. . . . '[M]ulticulturalism' . . . challenges the way the West has conceived its identity and articulated it in a canon of artistic works" (204). . . . The result has been the breaking open of a narrowly conceived Western cultural canon, retrieving the besieged cultures of 'marginal' groups and peoples. It has also meant bringing home some issues of 'high' theory to contemporary global society. Questions of 'meta-narrative' no longer concern just literary works, but the terms in which the post-Enlightenment West has traditionally couched its own imperial project. The decentring and deconstruction of categories and identities assume fresh urgency in a context of racism, ethnic conflict, neo-colonial domination. The 'other' is no longer merely a theoretical concept but groups and peoples written out of history, subjected to slavery, insult, mystification, genocide" (204-205).

• Theory & the Marketplace: "Theory, partly because of its high-poweredness, esotericism, up-to-dateness, rarity and relative novelty, has achieved high prestige in the academic marketplace, even if it still provokes the virulent hostility of a liberal humanism which fears being ousted by it. Post-structuralism is sexier than Philip Sidney, just as quarks are more alluring than quadrilaterals[!]. Theory has been one symptom in our time of the commodifying of the intellectual life itself, as one conceptual fashion usurps another as shortwindedly as changes in hairstyle. Just as the human body—along with a good deal else—has become aestheticized in our day, so theory has become a kind of minority art-form, playful, self-ironizing and hedonistic, one place to which the impulses behind high-modernist art have now migrated" (206; wow).

• Returning to the dismantling of English studies begun in the intro: theory "has no particular unity to it as a discipline; what, for example, do phenomenology and queer theory have in common? And none of the methods grouped under literary theory is peculiar to the study of literature; indeed most of them germinated in fields quite beyond it. Yet this disciplinary indeterminacy also marks a breakdown in the traditional division of intellectual labour, which the word 'theory' somehow flags. 'Theory' indicates that our classical ways of carving up knowledge are now, for hard historical reasons, in deep trouble. But it is as much a revealing symptom of this breakdown as a positive reconfiguration of the field. The emergence of theory suggests that, for good historical reasons, what had become known as the humanities could no longer carry on in their customary shape. This was all to the good, since the humanities had too often proclaimed a spurious disinterestedness, preached 'universal' values which were all too socially specific, repressed the material basis of those values, absurdly overrated the importance of 'culture' and fostered a jealously elitist conception of it" (207).

 Course Syllabus/Schedule

 Class Notes/Commentary