Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism by Terry Eagleton

 

Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Terry Eagleton

Abridged and simplified summary for students of Indian Universities. 

There are two summaries in this blog.

Introduction

 

Terry Eagleton expresses his disillusionment with the postmodernist agenda in Against the Grain. The essay, Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism, comes from Against the Grain. Eagleton says that postmodernism is not a critique of contemporary society, as claimed by Frederic Jameson. Eagleton has no faith in postmodernism. He feels that postmodernism parodies the revolutionary art of the twentieth-century avant-garde. It also dissolves art into modes of commodity production.

 

CAPITALISM, MODERNISM, and POSTMODERNISM by Terry Eagleton

 

CAPITALISM, MODERNISM, and POSTMODERNISM

Terry Eagleton

 There are two summaries in this blog.

Terry Eagleton is a leading British Marxist critic. He was involved in a project to reconcile Marxism with Catholicism. At the beginning of his career, he supported the British New Left Critical Tradition. Later, he became an ardent follower of the European structuralist and poststructuralist theory. His Criticism and Ideology (1976) and Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) reflect his engagement with the debates within Marxist literary theory generated by Althusser and Macherey. Eagleton expressed his disillusionment with the Althusserian project in Against the Grain (1986). [Refer to the introductory note by David Lodge and Nigel Wood—Modern Criticism and Theory—A Reader.]

 

CRITICISM, Inc. JOHN CROWE RANSOM

CRITICISM, Inc.

 JOHN CROWE RANSOM

 (Lecture notes by Dr S. Sreekumar)

 

(Revised )

Introduction

 J. C. Ransom (1888 –1974), one of the founders of the American New Criticism was a celebrated poet, critic, and a great teacher who had few equals as a companion and guide for many distinguished students like George Lanning, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. The term ‘New Criticism’ (itself) originated from the title of a volume of essays— The New Criticism— published by him in 1941. The New Criticism and theory dominated American literary thought throughout the middle of the 20th century, and the method of close reading introduced by the New Critics continues to be relevant in literary studies/criticism even today.  

 

‘Criticism Inc.’ (1937) is an important document in the history of literary criticism [like the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1801)], bringing together in one place all the distinctive ‘aims, attitudes, and assumptions’ of the American New Criticism. The essay envisages an ‘objective’ or ‘ontological’ (what exists) criticism that is the product of a ‘rigorous, disciplined, collaborative effort’ in the elucidation and evaluation of literary texts. Ransom believes that "criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic." To this end, he argues that ‘obstructive rival methods and approaches’ like impressionistic appreciation, historical approach (‘dry as dust’), linguistic scholarship, and "moral studies” should not influence literary criticism. ‘Criticism, Inc.,’ along with his other theoretical essays set forth some of the guiding principles the New Critics later developed. However, his former students like Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren played a more significant role in developing many of the key concepts like close reading that later became the hallmarks of the New Criticism.

 

This preview will not be complete without mentioning a pejorative connotation of the title, ‘Criticism Inc.’  By the closing decades of the twentieth century, the ‘hyperbolic, extravagant …explosion’ (J. Hillis Miller) of the technique of close reading^@   had led to many hermeneutic eccentricities in American universities.  For many traditional scholars and critics, annoyed by the radical shifts of interpretative thought, criticism has become a sort of industry [that reminded them of Detroit auto assembly lines?]. For them, the title, ‘Criticism, Inc.’ served as a mocking catechism. [Inc. is used in commercial circles as an abbreviation for ‘incorporated’—a legal corporation]. To be fair, criticism was a ‘humane pursuit’ for Ransom, never a commercial venture.

  [^@Let us look at an extreme example: Jacques Derrida's essay, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’ devotes more than eighty pages to an interpretation of the word "yes" in James Joyce's modernist novel Ulysses.

 

‘Criticism, Inc.’ has five parts.