Pub: Terry Eagleton, THE TASK OF THE CRITIC.

Eagleton, Terry, and Matthew Beaumont. The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue. London: Verso, 2010. The Task of the Critic is a comprehensive volume of interviews, covering both Terry Eagleton's life and the development of his thought and politics. Erudite and anecdotal, Matthew Beaumont's - Senior Lecturer in English at UCL - keen questions track the course of Britain's most esteemed and formidable literary theorist. Chapters cover his childhood in Salford to his undergraduate years and early academic life, as well as his developing ideas on subjects as diverse as Politics and Aesthetics; New Left and the Church; Marxism and Feminism; Death and Love. Lively and insightful, this collection will appeal not only to those with an interest in Eagleton himself, but to all those interested in the evolution of radical politics, modernism, cultural theory, the history of ideas, sociology, semantic inquiry and the state of Marxist theory. His outspoken views on everything from the Establishment: Oxbridge is "full of people who were there largely because they could not conceivably be anywhere else, as some people can only be in top-security psychiatric institutions", to the Monarchy, which reportedly prompted Prince Charles to call him "that dreadful Terry Eagleton" are discussed, expanded and explained in context. For further information, visit: http://www.versobooks.com/books/cdef/ef-titles/eagleton_task_of_the_critic.shtml.

"Tragic Hero: Laurie Taylor Interviews Terry Eagleton." NEW HUMANIST 124.4 (2009).

Reading the first sentence of Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion in the October 2006 edition of the London Review of Books was not unlike watching a gunfighter kicking over a table of cards in an otherwise well-ordered saloon. "Imagine," fired Eagleton, "someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology." And that was only the opening volley. Further down the page Eagleton proceeds to shoot up Dawkins's failure to do justice to the complexity of the God he sought to rout ("He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap"), his literality and lack of imagination ("Dawkins occasionally writes as though 'Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness' is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn") and his belief in the progressive nature of history ("We have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up"). Entertaining, even exhilarating stuff. But no great surprise to those who've followed Eagleton's career in any detail. He has a reputation for entering other people's rooms and kicking over their cards. He appears equally happy whether outraging conventional students of literature at Oxford with his vigorous espousal of critical theory, confounding his long-time Marxist allies with his periodic dabblings with spirituality, or lambasting Martin Amis for his suggestion that British Muslims "must suffer" for the actions of suicide bombers. (These comments, said Eagleton, were "not unlike the ramblings of a British National Party thug"). Neither does the degree of Eagleton's intellectual aggression seem to be modified by past friendships. In his new book Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, he is not content with amplifying his LRB attack upon Dawkins. He widens his target to include a new antagonist he calls Ditchkins, a composite of Dawkins and Eagleton's old International Socialist drinking mate and author of God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens. . . . Read the rest here: http://newhumanist.org.uk/2085.

Fish, Stanley. "God Talk." THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES May 3, 2009.

Eagleton, Terry. Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, Reason, Faith and Revolution, the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?” Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical transformation of what we say and do.” The other projects, he concedes, provide various comforts and pleasures, but they are finally superficial and tend to the perpetuation of the status quo rather than to meaningful change: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can ever be properly raised.” . . . Read the rest here: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/god-talk/.

Balakrishnan, Gopal. Review of Terry Eagleton's TROUBLE WITH STRANGERS. NDPR (May 2009).

Eagleton, Terry. Trouble with Strangers: a Study of Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Trouble with Strangers is the latest reflection on ethics from the distinguished literary critic Terry Eagleton. Best known for his witty and sympathetic popularizations of critical theory, Eagleton once claimed that its main contemporary currents -- Marxism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis -- were devoid of practical ethical corollaries, thereby contributing to a wider condition of relativistic malaise. Eagleton was probably the only proponent of post-structuralism at the time to be troubled by this. But even if it were true that the main variants of post-structuralism once exhibited such nihilist tendencies, one could say that they have all subsequently sought to make amends, for after their 80's heyday, all of them made a turn towards ethical inquiry, along lines laid out by Levinas, Derrida and the late Foucault. Indeed, even Lacanians like Žižek who dismiss the post-structuralist ethics of difference and undecidability, invariably do so in ethical terms. It might also be noted that this development seems to conform to a broader trend that has brought us bio-ethics, professional ethics, and ethical consumerism. Eagleton has addressed this broader ideological context in other works, but in Trouble with Strangers, he limits himself to providing a comparative overview of some of the different conceptions of ethics coming out of that mixture of continental intellectual traditions that is still called 'Theory'. The plan of the book might initially seem whimsical: the author divides ethical philosophies into categories drawn from Lacan's schema of psychic relations -- the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real -- here offered as little more than a loose framework of classification. Indeed the book's architrave is not even specifically Lacanian, and replicates the terms of Kierkegaard's familiar account of three existential worldviews -- the aesthetic, ethical, and religious. While lumping different bodies of thought together in this way might fail to capture the problems they raise on their own terms, Eagleton often employs this heuristic device to good effect, bringing to light shared assumptions, rhetorics, and blind spots. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15890.

Eagleton, Terry. "Culture and Barbarism: Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism." COMMONWEAL March 27, 2009.

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism? Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section labeled “Atheism,” hosting anti-God manifestos by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others, and might even now be contemplating another marked “Congenital Skeptic with Mild Baptist Leanings”? Why, just as we were confidently moving into a posttheological, postmetaphysical, even posthistorical era, has the God question broken out anew? . . . Read Eagleton's answer here: http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2488.

Eagleton, Terry. "Culture Conundrum." GUARDIAN May 21, 2008.

Smith, Dai. Raymond Williams: a Warrior's Tale. Carmarthen: Parthian, 2008. Ever since the early 19th century, culture or civilisation has been the opposite of barbarism. Behind this opposition lay a kind of narrative: first you had barbarism, then civilisation was dredged out of its murky depths. Radical thinkers, by contrast, have always seen barbarism and civilisation as synchronous. This is what the German Marxist Walter Benjamin had in mind when he declared that "every document of civilisation is at the same time a record of barbarism". For every cathedral, a pit of bones; for every work of art, the mass labour that granted the artist the resources to create it. Civilisation needs to be wrested from nature by violence, but the violence lives on in the coercion used to protect civilisation - a coercion known among other things as the political state. These days the conflict between civilisation and barbarism has taken an ominous turn. We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational. It is no surprise, then, to find that we have civilisation whereas they have culture. Culture is the new barbarism. The contrast between west and east is being mapped on a new axis. The problem is that civilisation needs culture even if it feels superior to it. Its own political authority will not operate unless it can bed itself down in a specific way of life. Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it. We can be sure that Williams would have brought his wisdom to bear on this conundrum. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/21/1.

Terry Eagleton from University of Manchester to Lancaster University.

Professor Terry Eagleton, the internationally celebrated literary scholar and cultural theorist, takes up a Chair within the Department of English and Creative Writing. Eagleton, who has written around fifty books and is himself the subject of at least two monographs, comes to Lancaster as one of the world’s leading literary critics and, according to The Independent in 2007, ‘the man who succeeded F. R. Leavis as Britain's most influential academic critic.’ Prior to his move to Lancaster, Terry Eagleton was John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester (2001-2008) and before that Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford (1992-2001). Professor Eagleton is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the English Association, and has held visiting appointments at such universities as Cornell, Duke, Iowa, Melbourne, Notre Dame, Trinity College Dublin, and Yale. Professor Eagleton’s post at Lancaster will include giving public lectures and offering seminars for both MA and PhD students. Read the rest here: https://domino.lancs.ac.uk/INFO/lunews.nsf/I/C466E031B05527D1802574E50033BEB8.

Flatt, Molly. "Criticism's Vocabulary of Cruelty." GUARDIAN BOOKS BLOG May 19, 2008.

Literary criticism is famously red in tooth and claw. Terry Eagleton, Mary McCarthy and Dale Peck are just a few reviewers who have made their names with funny and often frankly showy cruelty. With the book market more crowded than ever before, a bracing and briny critique can be just the thing to cut through the prettily packaged chaff. As Eaves pointed out, critics are brokers, advising readers where to invest their time and money with a duty to the often less-than-lenient truth - an image that is especially appealing to bloggers, avowedly fearless mouthpieces for the common man. Moreover, in his article this week on the notoriously prickly VS Naipaul's new work of criticism, A Writer's People, Radhakrishan Nayar reminds us that a clever tongue-lash can be a defining symptom of uncompromising and idiosyncratic literary brilliance. "Great writers can be impatient, quirky, rudely iconoclastic literary critics," he says. "It is almost a professional deformity. They achieve greatness through a stern commitment to sharply individual visions of the world." . . . The likes of Eagleton and Naipaul may well be motivated by their "stern commitment" to truth. But in a society that relishes sensationalism, flippancy and, most of all, the vicious culling of tall poppies, I suspect that our funny negatives are too often motivated by laziness, egotism and commercial appeal. . . . Read the rest here: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/05/review.html.

Eagleton, Terry. "Coruscating on Thin Ice." LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS January 24, 2008.

Most aesthetic concepts are theological ones in disguise. The Romantics saw works of art as mysteriously autonomous, conjuring themselves up from their own unfathomable depths. They were self-originating, self-determining, carrying their ends and raisons d’être within themselves. As such, art was a secular version of the Almighty. Both God and art belonged to that rare category of objects which existed entirely for their own sake, free of the vulgar taint of utility. The third member of this category was the human being. In their freedom, independence and glorious pointlessness, works of art were images of men and women – or at least of what they could become under transformed political conditions. In this sense, art was a politics all of its own, pointing to a future society in which human beings would be treated as ends in themselves. It was a foretaste of utopia in its very uselessness. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n02/eagl01_.html.

Ford, Liz, et al. "Eagleton Faces Axe at Manchester." GUARDIAN February 7, 2008.

Terry Eagleton, Britain's leading Marxist literary critic, faces the axe at Manchester University where he has been involved in one of the most ferocious literary spats of recent years with the novelist Martin Amis. . . . In July Eagleton reaches retirement age and speculation is mounting about his future at Manchester, which is in the process of losing 650 jobs to clear a £30m debt. . . . Read the rest here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2253955,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=10.

Fitzpatrick, Michael. "Was Jesus a Revolutionary? [Review of Eagleton on the Gospels]." SPIKED REVIEW OF BOOKS 8 (2007).

‘Was Jesus a revolutionary?’ asks Terry Eagleton in the opening sentence of his introduction to the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (1). Not according to Pope Benedict XVI. In his recent encyclical Spe Salvi Facti Sumus (‘In Hope We Are Saved’), he declares haughtily that ‘Jesus was not Spartacus’, whose ‘ill-fated’ struggle ‘led to so much bloodshed’ (the responsibility of the Roman authorities for the savage suppression of the legendary slave revolt is entirely ignored by Benedict). . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/4204/.

"The Armchair Revolutionary: Tim Adams Interviews Terry Eagleton." GUARDIAN December 16, 2007.

Terry Eagleton, one of Britain's most abrasive public intellectuals, has added to that reputation of late through his ongoing feud with Martin Amis over Islam. And now he has written a book that sees Jesus as a Palestinian insurgent. But, after a lifetime of baiting the establishment, the academic world has had enough of him. Why would that be, asks Tim Adams. . . . Read the interview here: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2228092,00.html.

More on the Amis-Eagleton Spat in the Editorial, STABROEK NEWS November 29, 2007.

. . . It would be disingenuous to claim, after such a destructive century, that we cannot judge religious and political ideologues on their stated aims and their actions. But what is moral superiority worth if it reconciles us to new horrors, like the catastrophic war which is currently breeding the very terrorism it was meant to curb? Easy judgements, however correct, are often the prologue to perilous simplifications: we tend to feel superior long after we have forgotten our morality. Read the rest here: http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56534130.

Vallely, Paul. "Terry Eagleton: Class Warrior." INDEPENDENT October 13, 2007

The solutions of Marxism may not long find favour. There would be few in the modern world who would buy Eagleton's political prescription "Get out of Nato. Get rid of capitalism. Put the economy back into public ownership". But the follow-the-money analytical template at the heart of Marxian analysis remains as apt now as it ever was. Eagleton may not have the right answers but he still asks the right questions. . . . Read the rest here: http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article3055841.ece.

Brown, Jonathan. "Amis Launches Scathing Response to Accusations of Islamophobia." THE INDEPENDENT October 12, 2007

When you write that I am 'with the beasts' on Islamic questions, it is because you've been listening, rather dreamily perhaps, to Professor Terry Eagleton. Now Eagleton, Yasmin, has a chair at Manchester University, where I have recently taken up an enjoyable post, and he is a man of a redundant but familiar type: an ideological relict, unable to get out of bed in the morning without the dual guidance of God and Karl Marx. More remarkably, he combines a cruising hostility with an almost neurotic indifference to truth; on the matter of checking his facts, he is, to be frank, an embarrassment to the academic profession. But his human need is simple enough: he wants attention to be paid to his self-righteousness – righteousness being his particular brand of vanity. It is a dull business, correcting Eagleton's distortions, but this is the work he is obliging me to do. The anti-Muslim measures he says I 'advocated' I merely adumbrated, not 'in an essay' ('he wrote', 'wrote Amis' – each of these is an untruth), but in a long interview with the press. . . . The rest is here: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article3052346.ece. (Thanks to Rob Leyshon for the link.)

Eagleton, Terry. "Rebuking Obnoxious Views is not just a Personality Kink." GUARDIAN October 10, 2007

If they cannot find a flaw in your reasoning, the great radical William Hazlitt wrote, they will certainly find one in your reputation. In his usual intellectually slovenly style, Rod Liddle accuses Marxists such as myself of supporting 'Islamism,' despite the fact that blowing the heads off little children in the name of Allah was not exactly what Marx had in mind. Amis's panic-stricken reaction to 9/11 is part of a wider hysteria that has swept over sections of the liberal left, one to which creative writers seem particularly prone. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2187361,00.html.

"The Ageing Punk of Lit Crit still Knows how to Spit: a Profile of Terry Eagleton." TIMES October 7, 2007

Eagleton used to be known as the closest thing to the Sex Pistols in British scholarship. With his attack on Amis he proves he can still spit with the best of them. . . . More here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2603984.ece.

Sutherland, John. "Eagleton v Amis: an Academic Storm." GUARDIAN October 4, 2007

If the most authoritative political voice on campus labels a colleague (albeit on the rhetorical rebound) a bigot and a racist, is that colleague's position tenable? Can Amis, with Eagleton's taunts bouncing off the classroom wall, competently teach classes in which there will be Muslims, Jews, gays and women? What should his response be: dignified silence? Eloquent refutation? Beautiful indifference? Disgusted resignation? Protest to the Senate? Is Eagleton too big a beast on campus to be reprimanded for uncollegial conduct - if that is felt necessary by the university authorities? Or perhaps they agree with their professor of cultural theory. . . . Read more here: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/10/eagleton_v_amis_an_academic_st.html.