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Modern Joyce

Terry Eagleton on Luke Gibbons, James Joyce and the Irish Revolution. Rereading of Ulysses as a saturnine blow for the Irish independence struggle.

Citizens of Babel

Terry Eagleton on Ken Hirschkop, Linguistic Turns 1890–1950. Language theory before post-structuralism, from Saussure and Shklovsky to Bakhtin.

Jameson and Form

Identifying Fredric Jameson’s literary style as one of his signal achievements, Eagleton asks whether his formal emphases also serve to stave off questions of content: morality, sexuality, subjectivity.

Political Beckett?

Samuel Beckett’s work for the French Resistance set against his dogged refusal of all ideology. The traces of Ireland’s history—hunger, deferment, deflation, indeterminacy—in his exile art.

Capitalism and Form

If bourgeois society requires both ceaseless economic dynamism and permanent ethical stability—disorder of invention and desire, order of labour and justification—what figures of the imagination offer a synthesis of these contradictory demands? The intertwining of routines and romances, virtues and villainies, in Scott and Goethe, Dickens and Balzac, Zola and Mann.

Subjects and Truths

Terry Eagleton on Alain Badiou, Ethics. A French conundrum: can radical universality be philosophically crossed with romantic epiphany?

Defending Utopia

Terry Eagleton on Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia. What surer sign of accommodation to the status quo than pompous funerals of the utopian imagination? Masks and corollaries of political resignation.

Self-Realization, Ethics, and Socialism

“The cover of Sean Sayers’s new study displays a black-and-white photograph of Karl Marx, the bushy dark patch of his mouth in arresting contrast with the encircling white halo of beard and hair. The book proposes an argument as bold, graphic and firmly delineated as its cover, though . . .” read more

Nationalism and the Case of Ireland

“The Enlightenment and its Romantic aftermath gave birth to two doctrines distinguished only by the letter s. The first was that people had the right to self-determination; the second was that peoples had such a right. The former belief is the keystone of modern democracy, and indeed . . .” read more

Ireland’s Obdurate Nationalisms

“Interviewer: What have you got against Roman Catholics? Belfast Protestant: Are you daft? Why, their religion of course.” read more

The Crisis of Contemporary Culture

“St Catherine’s, the college to which I have just migrated, got its name by a mistake. The college began life in the nineteenth century as a society for matriculating students too poor to gain entry to the University, which is not least of the reasons why I am . . .” read more

Doxa and Common Life

“Terry Eagleton Hello and welcome. Pierre Bourdieu and I will discuss some of the themes in our new books—primarily his book, Language and Symbolic Power, but also my book, Ideology. And then we will invite questions and comments.” read more

Saint Oscar: A Foreword

“I first thought of writing about Oscar Wilde when I discovered that hardly any of the Oxford students who asked to study him with me realized that he was Irish. Since Wilde himself realized this only fitfully, this is hardly a grievous crime, though it might be said . . .” read more

The Silences of David Lodge

“The success of the ‘campus’ novel in England is not hard to account for. Ever since Burke and Coleridge’s testy polemics against the Jacobins, the English attitude to the intelligentsia has been one of profound ambivalence. Intellectuals are seen as faintly sinister figures, bohemian and nonconformist, treasonable clerks . . .” read more

Resources for a Journey of Hope: The Significance of Raymond Williams

“Raymond Williams and I arrived in Cambridge simultaneously in 1961, he from a long stint in adult education to a college Fellowship, I from a year’s teaching in a Northern secondary modern school to an undergraduate place. It was hard to say which of us was more alienated. . . .” 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

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

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

Wittgenstein’s Friends

“Searching for an epigraph to his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein considered using a quotation from King Lear: ‘I’ll teach you differences’. ‘Hegel’, he once told a friend, ‘always seems to me to be wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest . . .” 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

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

'Aesthetics and Politics'

“The historic debates of the 1930s between Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno have now been assembled into a single volume, with an Afterword by Fredric Jameson. Readers of nlr have already had a foretaste of its contents: Brecht’s sardonic deflation of . . .” read more

Criticism and Politics: The Work of Raymond Williams

“It is difficult to see criticism as anything but an innocent discipline. Its origins seem spontaneous, its existence natural: there is literature, and so—because we wish to understand and appreciate it—there is also criticism. Criticism as a handmaiden to literature—as a shadowing of literature, a ghostly accomplice which, . . .” read more

Reply to Mulhern

“I am grateful for Francis Mulhern’s penetrative comment on my essay, which raises some methodological problems of first importance to Marxist criticism. He is right, I believe, that the necessarily elliptical character of my article excluded certain central issues (notably, ideological determinations other than those of ‘class situation’, . . .” read more

Ideology and Literary Form

“Bourgeois ideology in nineteenth-century England confronted a severe problem. Its withered roots in the sparse soil of utilitarianism seriously limited its ability to produce a richly symbolic, potently affective set of mythologies capable of permeating the texture of lived experience and so of performing the functions of an . . .” read more