Try free for 30 days
-
English Language: Free Yourself Through Criticism
- How We Should Read Without Activist Scholarship, as There Is More to Life Than Race, Gender, and Identity
- Narrated by: Helen Bowden
- Length: 3 hrs and 21 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
English Language: Free Yourself Through Criticism
Buy Now for $16.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's Summary
"Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature - Shakespeare, for example - can cease to be literature." These are the words of Terry Eagleton, the working-class Irish Marxist critic of English literature who believes that all literary theory is political.
Not only is his observation quite banal, but it does not qualify as literary criticism. It is journalistic writing, and its validity depends merely upon our definition of literature. Perhaps his definition is so generic as to encompass any random piece of published writing. In this case, anything in print would qualify as "literature" and anything out of print would not.
Indeed, there are many blue-collar workers who might describe a service manual as "the literature", so I guess, in the world that Terry Eagleton comes from, anything printed can be termed literature.
