Terence Francis Eagleton (born 22 February 1943) is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual.John Sitter, Chairman of the English Department at the University of Notre Dame and Editor of The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry, has describes Eagleton as "someone widely regarded as the most influential contemporary literary critic and theorist in the English-speaking world" "Eagleton himself has also replaced Leavis as the best known and most influential academic critic in Britain." Duke Maskell as cited by Nicholas Wroe on theguardian.com."Terry Eagleton is arguably the most influential contemporary British literary critic and theorist." James Smith as cited in the Introduction to Terry Eagleton: A Critical Introduction (Key Contemporary Thinkers) Polity Press, 2008. He is currently Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of English Literature at Lancaster University.
Eagleton has published over forty books, but remains best known for Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), which has sold over 750,000 copies. The work elucidated the emerging literary theory of the modern period, as well as arguing that all literary theory is necessarily political. He has also been a prominent critic of postmodernism, publishing works such as The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) and After Theory (2003). He argues that, influenced by postmodernism, cultural theory has wrongly devalued objectivity and ethics. His thinking is influenced by Marxism and Christianity.
Formerly the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford (1992–2001) and John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester (2001–2008), Eagleton has held visiting appointments at universities around the world including Cornell, Duke, Iowa, Melbourne, Trinity College Dublin, and Yale.
Eagleton delivered Yale University's 2008 Terry Lectures and the University of Edinburgh's 2010 Gifford Lecture entitled The God Debate. He gave the 2010 Richard Price Memorial Lecture at Newington Green Unitarian Church, speaking on "The New Atheism and the War on Terror". In 2009, he published a book which accompanied his lectures on religion, entitled Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.
In July 2024, Eagleton was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Lancaster University.
Early life Eagleton was born in Salford, Lancashire, England, on 22 February 1943, to Francis Paul Eagleton and his wife, Rosaleen (née Riley) Eagleton."EAGLETON, Prof. Terence Francis" at Who's Who 2012, A & C Black, 2012; online edn, Oxford University Press, December 2011; online edn November 2011; accessed 23 September 2012. He grew up in a working-class Catholic family of Irish descent in Salford, with roots in County Galway. His mother's side of the family had strong Irish republican sympathies. He served as an altar boy at a local Carmelite convent where he was responsible for escorting novice nuns taking their vows, a role referred to in the title of his memoir The Gatekeeper (2002).
Education and academia Eagleton was educated at De La Salle College, a Roman Catholic grammar school in Pendleton, Salford. His experience at the College, particularly of the then Principal Brother Columba (who disapproved of him enough to belittle his award in front of the entire school and parents at the 1961 speech day in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester), is described in his book The Gatekeeper. In 1961, he went to read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with first-class honours. He later described his undergraduate experience as a "waste of time". In 1964, he moved to Jesus College, Cambridge, where as a junior research fellow and doctoral student, he became the youngest fellow at the college since the 18th century. He was supervised by Raymond Williams. His thesis was on Edward Carpenter and was examined by E. P. Thompson. It was during this period that his socialist convictions began to take hold, and he edited a radical Catholic leftist periodical called Slant.
In 1969, he moved to the University of Oxford where he became a fellow and tutor of Wadham College (1969–1989), Linacre College (1989–1993) and St Catherine's College, becoming Thomas Warton Professor of English in 1992. At Wadham, Eagleton ran a seminar on Marxist literary theory which, in the 1980s, metamorphosed into the radical pressure group Oxford English Limited and its journal News from Nowhere: Journal of the Oxford English Faculty Opposition, to which he contributed several pieces. In 2001, Eagleton left Oxford to become the John Edward Taylor Professor of English at the University of Manchester.
Career Eagleton began his literary studies with the 19th and 20th centuries, then conformed to the stringent academic Marxism of the 1970s. He then published an attack on his mentor Williams's relation to the Marxist tradition in the pages of the New Left Review, in the mode of the French critic Louis Althusser. In the 1960s, he became involved with the left-wing Catholic group Slant, authoring a number of theological articles (including A Marxist Interpretation of Benediction), as well as a book Towards a New Left Theology. A major turning point was his Criticism & Ideology (1976) in which Eagleton discusses various theorists and critics from F. R. Leavis and (his tutor) Raymond Williams to Pierre Macherey. This earliest response to Theory is critical and substantive with Eagleton supplying a dense web of categories for "a materialist criticism" which situates the author as well as the text in the general mode of production, the literary mode of production and particular ideologies. In chapter 4 he gives a thorough overview of one theme in the English context – "organicist concepts of society" or "community" – as worked by petty-bourgeois Victorian writers, from George Eliot to D. H. Lawrence, and how this determines textual form in each instance.
Literary Theory and After Theory In Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983, revised 1996), Eagleton surveys the history of theoretical approaches to literature, from its beginnings with Matthew Arnold, through formalism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, to post-structuralism. In the process, he demonstrates what is the thesis of the book: that theory is necessarily political. Theory is always presented as if it is unstained by point of view and is neutral, but in fact it is impossible to avoid having a political perspective. Peter Barry has said of the book that it "greatly contributed to the 'consolidation' of literary theory and helped to establish it firmly on the undergraduate curriculum".Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester University Press, 2009, p. 273. Eagleton's approach to literary criticism is one firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition, though he has also incorporated techniques and ideas from more recent modes of thought as structuralism, Lacanian analysis and deconstruction. As his memoir The Gatekeeper recounts, Eagleton's Marxism has never been solely an academic pursuit. He was active in the International Socialists (along with Christopher Hitchens) and then the Workers' Socialist League whilst in Oxford. He has been a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.LRB archive. But only six contributions from 2014 to 2017.
After Theory (2003) was written two decades later, after the end of the great period of High Theory – the cultural theory of Foucault, the postmodernists, Derrida, et al. Looking back, Eagleton evaluates its achievements and failures, and proposes new directions needing to be pursued. He considers that among the great achievements of Theory were the expansion of objects of study (to include gender, sexuality, popular culture, post-colonialism, etc.), and the wide-ranging self-reflective criticism of traditional assumptions. But in Eagleton's estimation there were also many serious mistakes, for instance: the assault on the normative and the insistence on the relativity of truth leaves us powerless to criticize oppression; the rejection of objectivity and (excessively) of all forms of essentialism bespeak an unrecognized idealism, or at least a blindness to our human materiality, ultimately born of an unconscious fear of death; and cultural studies has wrongly avoided consideration of ethics, which for Eagleton is inextricably tied to a proper politics. It is virtue and politics and how they may be realized, among other things, that Eagleton offers as new avenues needing to be explored by cultural studies. After Theory fleshes out this political aspect, tied to ethics, growing out of the fact that humans exist in neediness and dependency on others, their freedom bounded by the common fact of death.
Dawkins, Hitchens and the New Atheism Eagleton has become a vocal critic of what has been called the New Atheism. In October 2006, he published a review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion in the London Review of Books. Eagleton begins by questioning Dawkins's methodology and understanding: "Imagine 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." Eagleton further writes, "Nor does [Dawkins] understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us." He concludes by suggesting Dawkins has not been attacking organised faith so much as a sort of rhetorical straw man:
Terry and Gifford Lectures In April 2008 Eagleton delivered Yale University's Terry Lectures, with the title Faith and Fundamentalism: Is belief in Richard Dawkins necessary for salvation?, constituting a continuation of the critique he had begun in The London Review of Books. Introducing his first lecture with an admission of ignorance of both theology and science, Eagleton goes on to affirm: "All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens – a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins – is talking out of the back of his neck." An expanded version of these lectures was published in 2009 as Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.
Football Eagleton sees football as a new opium of the people distracting ordinary people from more serious, important social concerns. Eagleton is pessimistic as to whether this distraction can be ended:
Politics Eagleton joined the Stockport Young Socialists at 16, influenced by his schoolfriend Bernard Regan. As a student at Cambridge, he was involved with the left-wing Catholic group Slant. He read Marx and Lenin in this period. Eagleton was also involved in the Cambridge Left Forum, which aimed to bring socialists in the university and local trade unionists together. At the end of the 1960s, Eagleton left the Slant group and moved to the secular, revolutionary left by joining the International Socialists. In the late 1970s he re-joined the Labour Party in Oxford and become a member of the Labour Committee on Ireland. In the early 1980s, he was a member of the Workers' Socialist League, whose activities were centred on the car factory in Cowley.
Criticism of Martin and Kingsley Amis
In late 2007, a critique of Martin Amis included in the introduction to a 2007 edition of Eagleton's book Ideology was widely reprinted in the British press. In it, Eagleton took issue with Amis' widely quoted writings on "Islamism", directing particular attention to one specific passage from an interview with Ginny Dougary published in The Times on 9 September 2006.