The Chronicle: 1/23/2004: A Champion of Cultural Theory?
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 50, Issue 20, Page B9
From the issue dated January 23, 2004

A Champion of Cultural Theory?

By ELAINE SHOWALTER

One of my favorite stories about the days of literary High Theory is told by the feminist critic Sandra Gilbert. In the late '80s, Gilbert was interviewing a candidate for a job in Princeton University's English department. "What would your dream course be?" she asked. "My dream course," the candidate responded, "would be theory and nontheory." "What's nontheory?" asked a committee member. "You know," the candidate replied. "Poems, stories, plays."

Ah, yes, I remember it well. In the '80s, theory ruled, and the subject formerly known as literature was banished or demoted in the interests of philosophy and aesthetic abstraction. In one sense, that was nothing new; the battle between poets and critics, between literature and analysis, is a perennial. While some 20th-century scholars maintained that literature needed theory like Stanley Fish needed a bicycle, others, including I.A. Richards, Northrop Frye, and William Empson, had long been tinkering with a theory machine that would put literature on the level with science.

But if the theory years of the '80s were no different in kind from those that came before, they were surely different in degree. High Theorists took the sweeping strategic position that every reader had a literary theory, but some readers were too stupid to recognize their own. In 1983, the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, then at the University of Oxford, published Literary Theory: An Introduction, which helped readers figure out what their assumptions were, and which became the best-selling guidebook to the new thinking. Eagleton linked the rise of theory to revolutionary social change, political militancy, and global struggle. Doing cultural theory (using politics, culture, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in equal measure) was not only more scientific than doing literary criticism. It was more radical, because more self-questioning, than writing literature, with all its unconscious ideologies.

As theory became the professional norm, Terry Eagleton became its most effective, popular, and versatile spokesman in the Anglo-American academic community. Gifted with a keen intelligence, a memorable writing style, and an impish and playful spirit, Eagleton not only produced a steady flow of lively and accessible writing about the shifts within the theoretical field, but also branched out into fiction, drama, and memoir. His career rose along with that of High Theory; today, having put Oxford behind him for a more politically suitable position as a professor of cultural theory at the University of Manchester, Eagleton is acknowledged to be, according to The Guardian, not only "the grand old man of British literary theory," but "the best known and most influential academic critic in Britain."

But, ironically, by the 1990s High Theory began to decline like other academic fashions. Even Eagleton, in the preface to the second edition of Literary Theory in 1996, conceded that with the collapse of communism in the late 1980s, and the revelations of the Yale deconstructionist Paul de Man's hidden Nazi collaborationist past, the wind had gone out of theory's radical sails. Books like Thomas Docherty's After Theory: Postmodernism/Postmarxism (1990) and Valentine Cunningham's Reading After Theory (2002) began to replace the sacred texts of deconstruction. Moreover, for young graduate students and professors in the '90s, theory was no longer something created to confront an entrenched critical conservatism, but rather another intellectual commodity to be traded in the academic marketplace. When The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism appeared in 2001, theory was no longer an act of radical transgression, and the book was as much a tombstone as a manifesto.

Now Eagleton has written his own account of the phenomenon, After Theory (Basic Books), designed to rally the troops, to restore the thrill to theory, and to ask "what kind of fresh thinking the new era demands." Eagleton reviews theory's rise and fall, and its losses and gains. But his tone is far from elegiac. Instead, he castigates the cultural left for "dispirited pragmatism" and calls for a broader and deeper cultural theory to counter the political shift of the 21st century toward "the triumphalist right."

In many respects, Terry Eagleton is the best champion cultural theory could have. He poses tough questions and gives strong answers. He admits that cultural theory "has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion, and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals, and foundations and superficial about truth, objectivity, and disinterestedness." As he says in a characteristically ironic understatement, those constitute a "rather large slice of human existence" to ignore. So he sets out to fill the gaps and propose fresh theoretical approaches to the Big Questions.

Much of what he proposes, however, is a correction and supplement rather than a rethinking. Eagleton wants to free cultural theory from crippling orthodoxy by challenging the relativism of postmodernist thought and arguing on behalf of absolute truth, human essences, and virtue (which includes acting politically). He engages with definitions of morality. He grapples with the universality of fundamentalism, and how its opposite is toleration: Since we are all fundamentalists to some degree in our beliefs, identities, and commitments, we must compensate by allowing others to practice their own reassuring faiths.

After Theory is intellectually impressive, but it falls far short of confronting the questions cultural theory faces from within and without literary study. First, why isn't literature, rather than theory, the best place to go for help about morality, love, evil, death, suffering, and truth, among other things? Having written a big book about tragedy, Eagleton obviously knows that on some topics, Shakespeare is a lot more relevant than Saussure. Eagleton himself is able to command an encyclopedic range of literary reference, but he takes the side of theory rather than literature, or even a position between the two. "Critics of theory sometimes complain," he notes, "that its devotees seem to find theory more exciting than the works of art it is meant to illuminate. But sometimes it is. Freud is a lot more fascinating than Cecil Day-Lewis. Foucault's The Order of Things is a good deal more arresting and original than the novels of Charles Kingsley."

That silly and false comparison is one demonstration of the current problems of literary theory. For surely no one studying literature is forced to read Kingsley or Day-Lewis (although one of the goals of advanced literary study, a goal one would expect a Marxist critic to appreciate, is to find the interesting, even arresting, elements of minor writers). And for every readable theorist, there are hundreds of fascinating novelists, poets, and playwrights -- but who's counting? And why must we trash one to praise the other?

Second, what does theory have to offer the real, historical world of action? When Eagleton writes about fundamentalism, for example, he seems to assume eccentric individuals cherishing their beliefs, rather than zealots violently imposing their views. He doesn't consider situations where a choice and a decision have to be made, although there are no good options. When he actually tries to come up with a response to terrorism and suicide bombers, his prose gets murky and his thinking hazy. It may be unfair to ask what Eagleton would advocate in any real-time situation of negotiation or threat, but one direct comment on, say, the conflicts between Islamic and Jewish student groups at the University of Manchester, or the French decision to ban the hijab in the public schools, would be worth pages of lofty and high-minded abstraction.

The most serious drawbacks of After Theory are its internal contradictions -- between an appeal to hard thinking and Eagleton's prejudice; between the call for depth and analysis and the temptation of superficiality and vilification; between the endorsement of disturbing complexity and the surrender to comfortable simplification. Eagleton rightly deplores the cheap morality and bad politics of caricaturing your enemy, "a deeply dangerous move, since to defeat an opponent you have first to understand him." He sees such caricatures everywhere in the "so-called war against terrorism" and is quick to spot "antitheoretical terms" like "patriot" that "shut down thought."

But when those caricatures or tags are applied to Americans, especially those who allegedly "believe that the world is situated somewhere just southeast of Texas," Eagleton is a happy man. He is not concerned about rhetoric shutting down thought when he calls Britain's Labor government "craven overseas lackeys of United States power," or about insults substituting for intelligence when he describes the "gang of predatory, semi-illiterate philistines" and "semi-fanatical fundamentalists" who rule the United States. He seems to think that cultural theorists can defeat George Bush simply by fulminating about his "reckless, world-hating hubris."

In his conclusions, Eagleton restates the challenge to 21st-century cultural theory: "To engage with an ambitious global history, it must have answerable resources of its own, equal in depth and scope to the situation it confronts." A noble hope, rarely met. That's especially true in the American edition, where there is a postscript on the post-September 11 world for American readers. Eagleton salutes his "political friends and comrades" in the United States and calls upon them to lead the "hard thinking" that must go on to save the world from its "self-appointed Messianic saviour." Plus ça change; Eagleton advocates hard thinking and a tragic, complex view of the world, but he relies on old slogans and easy dichotomies.

With friends like this, cultural theory needs no enemies.

Elaine Showalter is a professor emeritus of English at Princeton University.