Terry Eagleton

The Chronicle: 10/20/2006: Terry Eagleton, the Wanderer:

"Though Eagleton is only in his early 60s, a conference this past summer at the University of Manchester, where Eagleton is a professor of cultural theory, took stock of his prodigious work and career. I attended the conference — I was on a panel that interviewed him and am responsible for his pages in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism — looking for a handle to encapsulate his career, but instead found a kaleidoscope of themes, topics, and fields. The speakers at the conference remarked on his interest in Irish literature; his focus on aesthetic theory; his use of humor; his early engagement with French Marxism; his engagement with feminism; his forays in fiction and drama; his slide from theory to journalism; his path as a scholarship boy; his debunking of high culture; his criticism of postmodernism; and his playfulness. His work encompasses a carnival of themes.

Eagleton's wandering is not idiosyncratic, though, but presents a microcosm of the changes in criticism over the past 40 years. Like Zelig or Forrest Gump, Eagleton seems to have been there at all the crucial moments. He began precociously during the 1960s, publishing three books in his twenties as a rising figure on the British New Left, consistently declaring his Marxist stance. Then he embraced French structuralist theory, bringing the dense theoretical edifice and idiom of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser to Britain in Criticism and Ideology (1976), his one book not in plain language. After that he became the primary expositor and popularizer of theory, in Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976), Literary Theory, The Function of Criticism (1984), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and Ideology: An Introduction (1991). In his down"