How to Read Literature Terry Eagleton Sparknotes

Terry Eagleton
2013

Terry Eagleton is my favourite working-class lapsed Catholic Marxist literary theorist. It's a shortish list, I admit, but he'due south right in that location on the very top of the pole.

Despite the pleasure I've ever gotten from Eagleton's work — Why Marx Was Right, The Illusions of Postmodernism, The Gatekeeper — I was more than than a little put off by the first of How to Read Literature. Luckily, my discomfort prodigal long before the cease of the book.

At the very start, Eagleton offers this volume (HTRL, from now on) every bit a first volume on literary criticism for "beginners," for readers new to critical evaluation. He must accept been kidding!

I taught English literature to high school seniors for a very long fourth dimension, and I can tell you without whatsoever uncertainty that HTRL would have immediately and completely overwhelmed all just a very, very few of them. Perchance Eagleton's idea of what constitutes a "beginner" is radically unlike from my own? Mayhap, for him, a "beginner" is anyone without an Oxbridge Honours degree in English Literature?

I take no other explanation for why a volume for "beginners" launches early in the first chapter into a long, complex, subtle, and potentially-daunting discursion on the opening lines of A Passage to Republic of india. And it doesn't help that any deep appreciation of the remainder of Eagleton's book requires familiarity with dozens of works past most all of the canonical authors of the last four hundred years. Actually, Terry — for "beginners"?!

Fortunately for us, Eagleton'southward familiar flair, free energy, and unique viewpoint soon accept over, and one reads the remainder of the book with an admiring smiling. Every bit much as anything else, Eagleton is a showman, often a show-off — just he's so skilful at it that you just have to love him for it.

For sheer enthusiasm, you'd go a long way to vanquish Eagleton's dearest of literature. Whether information technology'southward imagery or label, deep meanings or deep language, Eagleton is all-in with the authors he assesses. His favourite books are favourites for very many and very specific reasons, and he devotes page subsequently page afterwards page to an admiring but always intelligent disentanglement of their parts and techniques.

And who merely Eagleton would put into the same book close readings of Baa Baa Blackness Sheep and Jude the Obscure, J. M. Rowling and Charles Dickens?

When Eagleton ponders the historical development of our notions of language, character, and literary worth, his opinionated stances combine with his considerable insights to generate informative and entertaining pronouncements.

On literary language, Eagleton writes that "Language in its everyday state is shop-soiled and inauthentic, and only by doing violence to it can it become supple enough to reflect our feel." He cautions readers non to rush past the writing to get to the significant:

The most mutual mistake students of literature brand is to go directly for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the manner that it says information technology. To read like this is to gear up bated the 'literariness' of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an business relationship of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska. Literary works are pieces of rhetoric too as reports. They need a particularly vigilant kind of reading.

When it comes to characters, Eagleton explains that "the shift from character as the peculiar marker of an private to grapheme as the individual himself is bound up with a whole social history."

It belongs, in a word, to the rise of modern individualism. Individuals are at present divers by what is peculiar to them, such as their signature or inimitable personality. What distinguishes u.s.a. from each other is more important than what we take in common.

While "a completely original literary figure would skid through the net of language, leaving us with nothing whatsoever to say," Eagleton claims that "nobody would have an orange juice with Oliver Twist if they could share a beer with Fagin."

Indeed, it'southward in the chapter on character that Eagleton is near convincing. He argues that "what it feels like to be a person is not quite the same for Franz Kafka as information technology is for George Eliot, and certainly non for whoever wrote the Upanishads or the Volume of Daniel." He centres this difference on a changing society:

Thinkers like Aristotle are perfectly aware that human beings have an inner life. It is just that they do not typically starting time from in that location, equally then much Romantic and modernist writing does. Instead, they tend to place this inner life in the context of action, kinship, history and the public earth. We have inner lives only because we belong to a linguistic communication and a culture.

He rightly claims that "once you lot start to come across human consciousness as unfathomably intricate, information technology is hard to contain it within the well-defined limits of Walter Scott'due south Rob Roy or Robert Louis Stevenson's Jim Hawkins. Instead, information technology begins to spill out over the edges, seeping into its surroundings as well as into other selves."

Eagleton observes that this new view of the individual generated characters that are as frequently tragic as they are liberated. He writes, "This indeterminacy is not always to be applauded, every bit postmodernists tend to assume. Information technology tin can involve a traumatic sense of loss and anxiety. Having likewise piddling identity can be quite every bit disabling as having besides much."

Eagleton is at his most judgemental when he considers the criteria for evaluating the worth of a slice of literature. He notes that "enjoyment is more subjective than evaluation."

Whether you adopt peaches to pears is a question of taste, which is not quite truthful of whether you call up Dostoevsky a more accomplished novelist than John Grisham. Dostoevsky is ameliorate than Grisham in the sense that Tiger Forest is a better golfer than Lady Gaga. Anyone who understands fiction or golf well plenty would be nearly bound to sign upward to such judgements. There comes a point at which not recognising that, say, a certain make of malt whisky is of world-grade quality means not understanding malt whisky. A true knowledge of malts would include the power to brand such discriminations.

And to those who object to the book equally a whole with the argument that times have changed, that serious literature is passé, Eagleton ends HTRL with this rejoinder:

Hamlet's last words are 'Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story . . . the rest is silence.' Steve Jobs's last words were 'Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.' Some might experience that there has been a certain falling-off hither.

For beginners, no, not at all, despite the author'due south claims. Merely for the rest of united states, How to Read Literature is itself often a delightful read.

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Source: https://ronbc2.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/how-to-read-literature/

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