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Title: The Illusions of Postmodernism by Terry Eagleton ISBN: 0-631-20323-0 Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Pub. Date: December, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.88 (8 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Blathering on about intellectual nonsense
Comment: Intellectual garbage on the subject of intellectual garbage.
Rating: 5
Summary: Despite Samson, the Temple Stands
Comment: This is not a scholarly work (few footnotes), but it does make scholarly demands. The reader needs to know a lot about postmodernism and Marxism before picking it up , because Eagleton doesn't fill in the background. In short, the book is not a primer. Still, pomo is a big subject and this is a slender volume, so a lot gets left out. Individual thinkers like Derrida, Kristeva, Lyotard and the usual suspects, are replaced by a popular view or what Eagleton calls the "sensibility of postmodernism as a whole." (p.viii). This amounts to a corporate image, but is the synthesis really a straw man, a travesty of the real thing? The reader will have to judge; in any case that is really not the point. Eagleton is not interested in what these thinkers precisely think or say. Instead, he's interested in what people believe pomo says, and just as importantly, in the kind of society that popularizes a pomo sensibility. His aim, therefore, is more about society and politics than which thinker said what and when. This is consistent with his Marxism, which is not much interested in where an idea comes from, but instead how it affects where society is going. But who cares what Marx or socialists say. Even postmodernism, Marxism's successor, celebrates the god of the free market; so who cares. Well, as Eagleton points out, capitalism triumphant is an exploitative mess that is not likely (not certainly) to get better; so we should care. Still and all, pomo earned its reputation by taking apart those grand ideas that Enlightenment thinkers, including Marx, needed for traction, concepts like universals, reason, humanism, et. al. The core of the book are the chapters where Eagleton shows how these modernist pillars still hold together despite attacks from pomo's deconstruction wing. How successfully he does this is again up to the reader to decide. In my view, he's pretty effective, especially when showing up pomo's political sterility. At times, however, I wasn't sure whether he was arguing that such pivotal concepts as universals and essences are really real or merely indispensible. Politically, I suppose the question comes to the same thing. Anyhow, this is a worthwhile book for those who are looking for a learned Marxist reply to the postmodern challenge and are willing to put up with the vagaries of an allusive style.
Rating: 5
Summary: Refreshingly LEFTIST critique of PoMo
Comment: Let me begin by confessing a bias--I positively love Terry Eagleton as a critic and writer. His _Intro to Literary Theory_ is amazingly lucid and influenced me a great deal.
I was first exposed to PoMo while working on an MA in German Studies @ Rice University. It was a subject I had never before confronted in my undergrad years. I walked into my first Intro to PoMo class a naive optimist and humanist and naive beliver in the Enlightenment tradition. Needless to say I was thrown for a heavy loop...PoMo utterly overwhelmed me, scrambled my brains, and in no small measure derailed my MA thesis for at least a year, trying to wrap my mind around this difficult subject. I felt a gut-level dislike of J.F. Lyotard and an immediate affinity for J. Habermas. Among PoMo writers, I felt most attracted to F. Jameson, who, of whom, of course, we got the least coverage in my class.
In many ways, Eagleton picks up where Jameson leaves off. Both are conscientious Marxist theorists who offer a welcome critque of PoMo from a Leftist perspective that I can embrace as opposed to the usual gamut of Right-Wing/Conservative PoMo bashing ala Alan Bloom, et. al. that I only partially can stomach and tends to leave me cold. In defense of PoMo's positive aspects, I highly recommend the writings of US Professors Michael Berube and Cary Nelson.
But Eagleton is a mint...a unabashed socialist from Britain, a true cultural heir of Orwell, I think...He and fellow Briton Christopher Norris both offer solid, fair critques of PoMo free of Rightist blather.
Eagleton gives the best of PoMo its due, but also takes it to task time and time again, often quite humorously with intellectual irony.
I recall reading _Teach Yourself Postmodernism_ and enjoying its solid critques of the failings of (classical) Modernism, but then it wandered off into advanced PoMo and I found myself dismayed, watching my sympthies dry up and evaporate as the elucidation of PoMo drifted from Modernist critque to positive assertions about PoMo that struck me as so wrong-headed. Eagleton points out in detail and says more eloquently than I could muster, just what is "wrong w/ PoMo"... (Norris does an equally fine job, too, i might add).
Eagleton in a number of ways reminds me of Noam Chomsky's response to PoMo. But whereas Chomsky is utterly dismissive of PoMo, Eagleton at least engages it forwardly, gives it a fair hearing.
Anyhow...This latest book by Terry Eagleton, it has much to recommend it. Enjoy!
-JJR
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Title: After Theory by Terry Eagleton ISBN: 0465017738 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 23 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions Series) by Fredric Jameson ISBN: 0822310902 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: February, 1992 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Idea of Culture (Blackwell Manifestos) by Terry Eagleton ISBN: 0631219668 Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Pub. Date: March, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton ISBN: 081661251X Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: November, 1996 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 10) by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Brian Massumi, Frederic Jameson ISBN: 0816611734 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: July, 1985 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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