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When Was Modernism?

“[This lecture was given on 17 March 1987 at the University of Bristol, as one of an annual series founded by a former student at the University and subsequent benefactor. The version printed here is reconstructed from my brief notes and Raymond’s even briefer ones. Although he . . .” read more

The Situationist International

“De Sade liberated from the Bastille in 1789, Baudelaire on the barricades in 1848, Courbet tearing down the Vendôme Column in 1870—French political history is distinguished by a series of glorious and legendary moments which serve to celebrate the convergence of popular revolution with art in revolt. In . . .” read more

Militants of Creativity

“How does one write about artistic modernism without simply reproducing its own forms, styles and devices—all the way from the locally minute to the massively architectonic? Raymond Williams, in his fine Introduction to the collection Visions and Blueprints, opens the question of the politics of modernism and the . . .” read more

Words Words Words: A Reply to Tony Pinkney

“‘Modernism’ and the ‘Avant-garde’ are not synonymous terms’. Tony Pinkney is absolutely right in saying so, in stressing the relevance of Bürger’s book (which, alas, had not been published at the time I wrote my article), and in pointing to the terminological ‘slide’ in the opening sentences of . . .” read more

Understanding Modernism: A Response to Franco Moretti

“Franco Moretti’s stimulating contribution to the debate on Marxism and Modernism (‘The Spell of Indecision’, NLR 164) unfortunately elides, in its very opening sentences, a crucial aesthetic distinction—with the result that his critique of modernism is of much less general validity than he assumes. Frank Kermode long ago . . .” read more

The Spell of Indecision

“In the past two decades, there has been a complete change in the dominant attitude of Marxist criticism towards Modernism. Essentially, Marxist readings of avant-garde literature are increasingly based on interpretative theories—Russian Formalism, Bakhtin’s work, theories of the ‘open’ text, deconstructionism—which, in one way or another, belong to . . .” read more

Max Raphael and the Question of Aesthetics

“Questions of aesthetics, never unduly prominent in Marxist approaches to culture, have recently become relegated to an extremely marginal position in theoretical and critical debates. It is not that Marxism has failed to develop a tradition of work on aesthetics—for in the past it has—but that such concerns . . .” read more

Bakhtin, Discourse and Democracy

“Carnival is not seen by the people; they live in it and everyone lives in it, because by its very definition it involves all the people. While carnival takes place, there is no other life beyond it. There is no escape from it, for it knows no spatial . . .” read more

Pynchon’s Aesthetic Radicalism

“Terry Eagleton’s recent article on ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism’ (nlr 152) concludes one of its sections with the following sweeping, brilliant statement: ‘The autonomous, self-regarding, impenetrable modernist artefact, in all its isolated splendour, is the commodity as fetish resisting the commodity as exchange, its solution to reification . . .” read more

The Moment of Truth

“Literary genres have temporal boundaries, and the current definition of modern tragedy is an evident if vague acknowledgment of this fact. But they have spatial boundaries too, which may be at times even more revealing—historically revealing—than temporal ones. Such is the case with modern tragedy, whose own geography . . .” read more

The Uses of Cultural Theory

“For a year or so I have been wanting to say something relatively formal about cultural theory, and this seems to be an occasion. The point is not, at least initially, one of proposition or amendment within this or that theory of culture, but rather a reconsideration of . . .” read more

The Poetry of Radical Republicanism

“Few books can have stirred up such controversy even before falling from the press than this anthology. It became apparent before publication that Tom Paulin’s editor at Faber, a media-hyped poet whose ignorance of political affairs would shame a Martian, was deeply out of sympathy with his author’s . . .” read more

Class and Impressionism

“One of T.J. Clark’s objectives in The Painting of Modern Life is to make us ‘unlearn our present ease with Impressionism’, and in this he succeeds magnificently. By raising the issue of the representation of class (usually dismissed as irrelevant in art history), he opens up the whole . . .” read more

Eagleton and English

“The publication of The Function of Criticism in 1984, Terry Eagleton’s fourth book in four years, consolidated his reputation—recognized on both the Left and the Right—as the most prominent and prolific Marxist literary theorist currently writing in this country. The character of such a reputation is, however, inevitably . . .” read more

Adversarial Contexts and Creativity

“I was profoundly affected as a young man by the primeval rainforest and the savannahs of British Guyana in South America.” read more

Scholarship Boy: The Poetry of Tony Harrison

“He both wants to go back and yet thinks he has gone beyond his class, feels himself weighted with knowledge of his own and their situation, which hereafter forbids him the simpler pleasures of his father and mother. And this is only one of his temptations to self-dramatization. . . .” read more

Art and Dialectic in the Work of Wilson Harris

“In his first major work, Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss made the point that the anthropologist had become the ‘hero’, shaman and priest of the secular world, his expeditions into the savage hinterland a modern-day substitute for the primitive rite of passage into manhood, power and prestige within the . . .” read more

Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism

“In his article ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (NLR 146), Fredric Jameson argues that pastiche, rather than parody, is the appropriate mode of postmodernist culture. ‘Pastiche’, he writes, ‘is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language; but it is . . .” read more

Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism

“It has become customary for historians to speak about the death of the Victorian Age in 1914, or the reign of a politico-monetary Long Sixteenth Century persisting well into the middle of the calendrical 17th century. By the same token, there are innumerable incitements in contemporary cultural, if . . .” read more

The Language of African Literature

“The language of African literature cannot be discussed meaningfully outside the context of those social forces which have made it both an issue demanding our attention, and a problem calling for a resolution. On the one hand is, let us call a spade a spade, imperialism in its . . .” read more

Introduction to Ngugi

“‘A time has come when silence before the crimes of the neo-colonial regime in Kenya is collusion with social evil’—so wrote Ngũgĩ in 1982 in his most recent book, Barrel of a Pen (New Beacon Books). It was a prophetic description.” read more

Surrealism and Patriotism: The Education of an American Novelist

“Would you tell us something about the influences which have formed you as a writer?” read more

Jameson and Post-Modernism

“Perry Anderson in his Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) has pointed out that, because of the general debilitation of a Stalinized socialist culture in Russia and the absence of any significent working-class audience here, the most gifted of Western Marxist thinkers directed their attention away from class action . . .” read more

Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

“The last few years have been marked by an inverted millennarianism, in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the . . .” read more

The Rhetoric of Experience

“Reading Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory is not unlike attending a particularly good series of introductory lectures: a revelation of new and startlingly intelligible terrain if you know little about its subject; pleasurable and still illuminating if you are already familiar with it. The book’s witty, lucid attack (especially . . .” read more

Modernity and Revolution

“The subject of our session this evening has been a focus of intellectual debate and political passion for at least six or seven decades now. It already has a long history, in other words. It so happens, however, that within the last year there has appeared a book . . .” read more

The Signs in the Street: A Response to Perry Anderson

“Perry Anderson’s discussion of my book, All that is Solid Melts into Air, is both welcome and perplexing. He is so appreciative and generous at the beginning, so dismissive and scornful at the end—not merely toward my book, but toward contemporary life itself. What happens in the middle? . . .” read more

The Question of Value: a Discussion

“Terry Eagleton: Let me begin with what strikes me as an interesting fact about the so-called ‘canon’ of literature, which has recently generated so much debate . I take ‘canonical’ works to be in some sense works of value; but the truth is that if you write . . .” read more

The Writer’s Resistance (Peter Weiss)

“The key to Peter Weiss’s work lies in a short text entitled My Local Area. ‘It is a place,’ he writes, ‘for which I was marked down and from which I escaped. . . . Its name was Germanicized to improve the understanding of those who lived and . . .” read more

Midnight’s Children

“Midnight’s Children has been widely acclaimed as a literary tour de force. It has won plaudits for its author, Salman Rushdie, from critics throughout the Anglo-Saxon world and has been awarded the prestigious Booker Prize. Rushdie has been compared, at different times, to Gunter Grass and Gabriel . . .” read more

The Dialectic of Fear

“The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. The monster and the vampire are born together one night in 1816 in the drawing room of the Villa Chapuis near Geneva, out of a society game among friends to while away a rainy . . .” read more

Goethe: The Reluctant Bourgeois

“When Johann Wolfgang Goethe came into the world on 18 August 1749 in Frankfurt-am-Main, the town contained 30,000 inhabitants. In Berlin, the largest town in Germany at the time, there were 126,000, whereas both Paris and London had already surpassed 500,000. These figures are an important signpost to . . .” read more

Introduction to Benjamin

“Although Walter Benjamin possessed a profound knowledge of classical German literature, his preoccupation with modernism usually led him to explore more obscure or neglected traditions. Thus he ignored mainstream German drama in favour of Baroque tragedy, because of the relevance of allegory to Expressionism; and his writings on . . .” read more

Art and Biology

“I expect that some who saw the poster for this series of lectures on ‘Art and Science’, organized to celebrate 150 years of the British Association, wondered what contribution to this topic might be made by someone associated with the Marxist tradition of writing about art, a tradition . . .” read more

Expressionism and Working-Class Fiction

“In his essay, ‘The Storyteller’, Walter Benjamin distinguishes between two generic traditions of story-telling, symbolized by two contrasting occupations: the peasant and the voyager. ‘If one wants to picture these two groups through their archaic representatives’, he wrote, ‘one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, . . .” read more

Walter Benjamin--Revolutionary Writer (II)

“Adorno was suspicious of Benjamin’s notion of a collective dream: ‘For who is the subject of the dream?’ he wrote to Benjamin in 1935, referring to the Arcades exposé, where in place of the individual subject of bourgeois psychology, ‘the collective consciousness is invoked, but I fear that . . .” read more

Marxism, Structuralism and Literary Analysis

“Recent events in Cambridge, of which some of you may have heard, have persuaded me to bring forward some material which I was preparing for a course of five lectures in the autumn. Because the material was originally conceived on that scale, the prospect for this crowded hour . . .” read more

Walter Benjamin--Revolutionary Writer (I)

“Walter Benjamin’s works have survived in opposition to the intellectual mainstream in which history has swept forward: the racism which forced him into exile in the thirties, the fascism resulting in world war, in the midst of which he took his own life, and, since then, the democratic . . .” read more

The Idealism of American Criticism

“From the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, American literary theory fell under the sway of a curious hybrid of critical technocracy and Southern religious-aesthetic conservatism known as the ‘New Criticism’. Offspring of the failed Agrarian politics of the 1930s, and aided by the collapse of a Stalinised Marxist . . .” read more

Materialist Aesthetics

“Marxist aesthetics has long since rejected the reductionism of those who sought to ‘explain’ art simply by reference to its supposed determination in the interests or ideology of particular social classes. The shift away from economism, from the unsatisfactory and intolerant division between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, has engendered . . .” read more

A Radio Talk on Brecht

“There is always something deceitful in trying to talk about living writers impartially and objectively. Nor is this only a personal problem—though no one can help being affected in a thousand and one ways by the aura that surrounds a contemporary. The deception I have in mind is . . .” read more

The Moment of 'Scrutiny'

“In 1968, Perry Anderson drew attention to the bizarre role and status of literary criticism in the ‘national culture’; in a context in which the social sciences and historical disciplines were inhibited by a largely imported positivism, it seemed to offer itself as the only field in which . . .” read more

Bloch’s 'Traces': The Philosophy of Kitsch

“The title Traces mobilizes for the purposes of philosophical theory the primary experiences derived from reading Red Indian stories. A broken twig, a footprint on the ground, speak volumes to the eagle eye of the child who speculates about them, instead of resting content with what anyone can . . .” read more

Della Volpe’s Aesthetics

“Della Volpe’s Critique of Taste (1960) represented the first attempt in Italy at what its author describes as ‘a systematic exposition of a historical-materialist aesthetic’. Previous Italian Marxist aesthetics had been sketchy and, apart from a very few cases, compromised with the idealist aesthetics of Croce or Gentile, . . .” read more

Benjamin’s Philosophical Cabaret

“Whenever a Cabaret appears, we cheerfully go along to see it—then, one moment something strikes a wrong note, the next moment something else has changed and doubled back in its tracks. Benjamin’s first essay in this form affords us the same experience. There is no lack of playful . . .” read more

The Pessimistic Materialism of Giacomo Leopardi

“Giacomo Leopardi was born at Ricanati (a town of the Marches) in 1798, the off-spring of a reactionary and clerical family of the minor nobility (the Marches belonged to the Papal States, even though at the time of Leopardi’s birth its lands were occupied by the French). He . . .” read more

Settling Accounts with the Russian Formalists

“In his highly praised History of Russian Literature, Mirsky delivers a severe judgment on the Russian Formalist Movement (1915—30) which is now once again, at least in the ‘West’, attracting great interest among initiates and laymen alike, whether ‘bourgeois’ or ‘Marxist’. According to Mirsky, it was characterized by . . .” read more

Introduction to Lukacs

“The aesthetic debates within German Marxism are now acknowledged to constitute one of the most remarkable sequences in European cultural history this century. Few episodes either in the general history of Marxist theory or in the course of aesthetic discussion as a whole can match the depth and . . .” read more

On Walter Benjamin

“Our purpose here is to demonstrate that the spirit of allegory manifests itself quite unambiguously both in the theory and in the practice of the modernist avant-garde.” read more

Liberality and Order: The Criticism of John Bayley

“Few English literary critics command more respect than John Bayley, Warton Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford. The author of six full-length critical studies, as well as of numerous articles and reviews, Bayley has not only become established as a revered figure within the literary . . .” read more