Literary Theory: an introduction by Terry Eagleton

Literary Theory: an introduction

by Terry Eagleton

انتشارات رهنما

چاپ سال ۱۳۸۷

۲۳۴ صفحه

قطع: رقعی

جلد: شومیز

کیفیت: دست دوم، داخل کتاب نوشته دارد

Preface

This book is now a quarter of a century old; but if it seems somewhat longer in the tooth than that, it is perhaps because so much has happened since it first appeared. One such development is that literary theory no longer occupies the commanding place that it seemed to do 25 years ago.
When this book was first written, theory, like the latest Jean-Luc Godard movie, was new, foreign, subversive, enigmatic and exciting. Some students still rightly find it all these things; but just as the shock of modernist art was eventually absorbed until, as Fredric Jameson once remarked, Joyce’s Ulysses came to seem really quite a conventional sort of story, so theory is no longer the outlandish affair that it once was. Indeed, as I note in the Afterword to this book, we have witnessed in recent times the growth of a kind of anti-theory

–though one which is itself of theoretical interest. In this, it differs from the usual philistine objections to theory, which for the most part reflect more of an animus than an argument.

Has theory, then, become ‘institutionalized’? The question can’t be answered properly, I think, if the word ‘institutionalized’ (a term which carries sinister connotations of syringes and strait-jackets) is taken in a purely pejorative sense. That theory is now widely taught in academic institutions is to be commended, not condemned as some sort of squalid capitulation. Things have changed for the better in this respect since I myself taught Marxist theory every week at Oxford in the early 1970s in an informal session which was not even advertised on the university lecture list, which was widely disapproved of by my colleagues, and which operated less like an orthodox seminar than a kind of refuge for ideologically battered students.

Most students of literature can now expect a theory course or two to be on offer, a fact that one naturally welcomes.