After Theory | 
|  | | | Title: | After Theory | | Author: | Terry Eagleton | | Publisher: | Basic Books | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 30 November, 2004 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0465017746 / 9780465017744 | | List Price: | $16.95 | | You Save: | $4.57 | | Amazon Price: | $12.38 | |
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Product Description
As heralded everywhere from NPR to the pages of the New York Times Magazine, a new era is underway in our colleges and universities: after a lengthy tenure, the dominance of postmodern theory has come to an end. In this timely and topical book, the legendary Terry Eagleton ("one of [our] best-known public intellectuals."- Boston Globe) traces the rise and fall of these ideas from the 1960s through the 1990s, candidly assessing the resultant gains and losses. What's needed now, After Theory argues, is a return to the big questions and grand narratives. Today's global politics demand we pay attention to a range of topics that have gone ignored by the academy and public alike, from fundamentalism to objectivity, religion to ethics. Fresh, provocative, and consistently engaging, Eagleton's latest salvo will challenge everyone looking to better grasp the state of the world.
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Customer Reviews:
• Not Terribly Impressive 08 March, 2005
I have recently read this book, and I have to say that I'm less than impressed with it. When I started it, I was pleased and relieved that it was so easy to read and entertaining, but after a couple of chapters of Eagleton's witticisms and biting humor, I found myself waiting for the "theory" to kick in...and it took him until the last three chapters. The book seems to be primarily a rant directed against capitalism (i.e.-the United States, though he does make a tiny disclaimer about this in the postscript), and while it's not surprising coming from an alleged Marxist, it does eventually begin to wear on the reader--at least on this reader. He has good points, but After Theory really feels more like a soapbox for a fist-shaking rant than a discussion of the decades that have comes after literary theory's "golden age" of 1965-1980. I was really hoping for more out of this book.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2WG1CMAZHOWA
• Dour Marxist Anti-american Screed 12 March, 2008
Terry Eagleton is clearly bitter. Bitter about the status of America in the global community, bitter that his beloved Marxist dogma has been relegated to the rubbish bin of history. He does, however, have some perceptive things to say about the legacy of critical theory. What will replace theory as the new academic fad when theory finally vanishes from the intellectual horizon of the college English department? What will we read when Foucault, Derrida, Barthes and Althusser have been thoroughly debunked? Could it be...the source texts themselves?! Isn't that revolutionary?!! Someone might actually read...a novel! Or a poem! Oh, be still my beating heart!
- Reviewed by customer ID: A14VTERXENYRMA
• Reminder Of The Compassion Of True Socialism 28 January, 2006
I agree with those who find this book preaches to the converted. In this case, the radical (as opposed to the liberal) left. I remain skeptical of all such world-changing agendas, but if you're needing a sharp rejoinder to the capitalist hegemony that permeates even this electronic screen you're reading, then this book's a sensible collection of somewhat scattered thoughts on the need for kindness, humility, and idealism. Getting back to the roots of Marx rather than Marxism, and the socialist imperative to assist what Eagleton updates to be "reciprocal self-realization", he argues that cultural theory must revive itself through an embrace of Aristotle's ethics of flourishing, and that freedom and autonomy can be achieved by attending to others' needs rather than our own, as capitalism demands.
Of course, as with many works in both philosophy and critical theory, how this is to be practically accomplished cannot be found in these lively if self-congratulatory pages that take on the current Bush administration, the selfish and hypocritical psuedo-Christian contigent, and those pursuing profit so that, as Eagleton notes in an aside that seems to be more true each day, capitalism can appropriate our very senses. Even if this is more inspiration than information, Eagleton, by his use of examplars as disparate as George Best, Lady Macbeth, Mick Jagger, the anawim of the book of Isaiah, and especially Lear on the heath makes his points engagingly and wittily. I noticed a strong anti-Americanism permeating nearly every page, especially as the book went on, but his postscript assures readers that he only means those in charge right now, not the rest of us presumably much better educated and more sensitively altruistic!
The brisk first hundred pages, taking on the high and low points of what has come to be the currently pre-eminent power of critical theory were, for me, the most insightful. After this, his journey into philosophy, while nearly understandable and almost cogently clear (by comparison with most theorists), wandered into more rarified territory. I recommend his short book--nearly an elegy--on Marx as a companion to this; it's a bit of a shock to read 227 pages that preach the end of theory after his primer on Literary Theory: an Introduction aided many of us two decades ago in plodding our way through the muddled theorists with whom so many of my tenure-grasping professors and ambitious classmates were smitten. I disagree with his inclusion of some of these theorists as clear explicators of academic prose. On the other hand, his put-downs of scholarly obfuscation prove welcome. If only all scholars wrote with such verve.
After decades commenting on as well as leading the lefty and tenured vanguard, Eagleton keeps up with impressive stamina with the current zeitgeist, and he's not winded yet. While this book, again, will not likely convince anyone who is not already sympathetic to the socialist-humanist approach, it is worthwhile, if a little too reliant on a flow of snappy and snarky rejoinders. But then, how many theorists, right, left, or center, can entertain as they educate?
Although I left this book wondering all the more how Eagleton's mission to retrain the world so as to "take a breather from capitalism" and opt for a socialist rest-cure is in any real sense going to happen, I did learn from his eagerness and his enthusiasm to keep more aware of how we are being led further and further away from the compassion and the moral decency that have characterized true socialists, humanists, and educators.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AUEY946M1L939
• Waking Up From Theory 04 June, 2006
Terry Eagleton, who introduced a generation of students to deconstructionism and postmodern theory (also called "theory"), now laments the state of the movement he once heralded. While still respecting some of the insights of Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva, and others, Eagleton believes their disciples are in need of correction. The movement is largely spent, focusing on trivialities instead of on deeper questions of truth and justice. So he charts a course "after theory." (He voiced similar criticisms in his 1996 book, The Illusions of Postmodernism.) Unlike postmodernists, who often revel in obscurity, Eagleton writes with lucidity, passion, and pluck. The book should interest philosophers as well as literary critics, since Eagleton addresses classic philosophical topics such as the objectivity and absoluteness of truth, the meaning and moral purpose of human life, and political philosophy.
By "postmodernism," Eagleton means, "roughly speaking, the contemporary movement of thought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge. Postmodernism is skeptical of truth, unity and progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends toward cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity." This perspective provides scant resources for the perennial issues of philosophy and politics, since it denies the possibility of finding a philosophically satisfying worldview (or metanarrative.) But Eagleton believes that the crisis of international terrorism against the West means that it must reflect on its own foundations, a notion postmodernists abhor as "modernistic." Eagleton sometimes strongly indicts the deficits of postmodern theory. "It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals, and foundations, and superficial about truth objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is a rather large slice of human existence to fall down on." Indeed.
Cutting against the postmodern grain, Eagleton argues persuasively for objective and absolute truth. He rightly notes that the fallibility of some truth claims does nothing to undermine the category of truth itself. Although he does not put it this way, postmodernists often confuse the metaphysics and the epistemology of truth. Truth, on the correspondence view--which Eagleton advocates-- is (or means) "agreement with reality." This is the definition--or metaphysics--of truth. Truth-claims may be defended through a variety of intellectual means; this concerns epistemology. Simply because truth is sometimes elusive does not imply that it is constructed (and deconstructed) by linguistic communities, as postmodernists posit. This matters to Eagleton because "it belongs to our dignity as moderately rational creatures to know the truth." Moreover, political critique and action demand access to reality. If truth "loses it force, then political radicals can stop talking as though it is unequivocally true that women are oppressed..."
This ethical concern lies at the root of Eagleton's desire to reform society according to a particular vision--a mixture of Marxism and Thomism (sans God). Eagleton's Catholic roots are evident when he describes an ideal order in which humans flourish within communities as they realize their own natures and contribute to the realization of others' natures as well. His vision is socialistic--with plenty of acerbic criticisms of capitalism and American conservatism--and post-religious. Nevertheless, he argues that a secular worldview will have difficulty wedding fact and value meaningfully. In one eloquent paragraph, he speaks of Christianity's profound power to give meaning, value, morality, and vision to existence. In spite of that, "It was thus a particular shame that it involved a set of beliefs which seemed to many decent, rational people remarkably benighted and implausible."
There are, of course, "many decent, rational people" (including many contemporary analytic philosophers) who do not find this religious worldview "benighted and implausible" but rational. Truth isn't settled by counting (educated) noses, but one wishes that Eagleton had provided some arguments for denying a worldview he seems ambivalent about abandoning. He sometimes sounds like a God-haunted atheist, given the attention he pays to explicitly biblical themes. Moreover, his notion of a rational human nature and telos with access to objective moral truths may cohere better with a theistic worldview than an atheistic one. Eagleton asks, "What are human beings for? The answer is surely: nothing..." because we are simply ends in ourselves. He takes this to be a brute fact, requiring no explanation. But how can humans have intrinsic moral value as ends in themselves in a materialistic world without design? How do these objective moral values emerge from a purely material matrix of cause and effect? Moral relativism may be more fitting for such a metaphysic. Eagleton advances no real arguments regarding these significant philosophical concerns.
Despite this large lacuna, After Theory deserves a wide readership because of its insistence that truth has yet to succumb to the machinations of postmodernist assassins.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A4TVX5141Y2TG
• Swear That It Is A New Copy.... 11 August, 2005
The book looks brand new, crisp pages and all!
- Reviewed by customer ID: AW7EKEXP49UZL
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