The Event of Literature
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this characteristically concise, witty, and lucid book, Terry Eagleton turns his attention to the questions we should ask about literature, but rarely do. What is literature? Can we even speak of "literature" at all? What do different literary theories tell us about what texts mean and do? In throwing new light on these and other questions he has raised in previous best-sellers, Eagleton offers a new theory of what we mean by literature. He also shows what it is that a great many different literary theories have in common.
In a highly unusual combination of critical theory and analytic philosophy, the author sees all literary work, from novels to poems, as a strategy to contain a reality that seeks to thwart that containment,and in doing so throws up new problems that the work tries to resolve. The "event" of literature, Eagleton argues, consists in this continual transformative encounter, unique and endlessly repeatable. Freewheeling through centuries of critical ideas, he sheds light on the place of literature in our culture, and in doing so reaffirms the value and validity of literary thought today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What, exactly, is literature? In his latest, Eagleton returns to familiar questions about the nature of literature and theory, extending and refining the thinking of his early landmark work, Literary Theory: An Introduction. In wry, thrifty prose, he surveys a range of theoretical positions in order to ponder a larger question about "whether there really are such things as common natures in the world." While he defends the major claim of his earlier work (that literature "has no essence whatsoever"), he brings to bear a variety of sources (such as scholastic debates between realism and nominalism and Wittgensteinian "language-games") in order to find a middle ground between the claim that literature has no essence and that the category of literature indeed, the categorical impulse itself still matters. He applies similar techniques in thinking about the nature of fiction, which, "despite its limits, can disclose possibilities beyond the actual." The book's last essay asks whether approaches to literature like semiotics, feminism, and Marxism possess a common nature and, if so, what that nature looks like. In order to address this question, Eagleton turns to "strategies," which he defines as ways of organizing reality capacious enough to allow for the complexities of "frictions and conflicts." These essays are a fascinating and often compelling expansion of Eagleton's oeuvre, though they may be most useful to those already familiar with the author's positions and theoretical biases.
