* On Eagleton *

I swear Terry Eagleton will never be gone from my life. Just when I thought I was free of him, I was in a book store and jumping at me was Marxist Literary Theory. How could I not pick it up. Even better, how can a book on Marxism be $39.95? What about us common people? I leave you this to think about:


"[A]ny Marxist criticism worth the name must thus adopt a wellnigh impossible double optic; seeking on the one hand to take the full pressure of a cultural artefact while striving at the same time to displace it into its enabling material conditions and set it within a complex field of social power. What this means in effect is that one will find oneself bending the stick too far towards formalism and then too far towards contextualism, in search of that ever-receding discourse which would in allegorical manner speak simultaneously of an artistic device and a whole material history, of a turn of narrative and a style of social consciousness."

-- Terry Eagleton, "Introduction" to Marxist Literary Theory (1996)