Joe Salvatore, books editor of the Brooklyn Rail, assigned me the critic Terry Eagleton's new book How to Read Literature (Yale UP). Joe is kind enough to comment on the outcome as follows:
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Back in Boston, before moving to NYC for grad school, I read SIGNS OF THE TIMES, David Lehman's
critique of literary deconstruction and of its infamous practitioner
Paul de Man. I loved that book (as well as many others by Lehman) and am
honored to have him reviewing Terry
Eagleton's new book HOW TO READ LITERATURE for the September 2013 issue
of The Brooklyn Rail. In his review, Lehman employs a bit of that very
approach to critque Eagleton. Lehman says: "If deconstructive criticism
has taught us anything, it is to take a good long look at a peripheral
element for the light it throws on the putative center of the text. I
propose to do just that here, with particular attention to Eagleton’s
use of Winston Churchill." —David Lehman, The Brooklyn Rail, September
2013
>>>
Thank you, Joe. Here's the opening of my piece:
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Some blurbs act as warnings. When I see “laugh-out-loud funny” on the
back of a book, I wonder whether the blurbist is secretly telling me not
to buy the supposed laugh riot. Still, because it is devoted to close
reading, an activity I love, I decided to pick up Terry Eagleton’s How to Read Literature (Yale University Press; 232 pages).
Eagleton, the English literary critic known as a popular explainer of
the recondite, has held appointments at Oxford and more recently
Lancaster, with guest stints at Cornell, Duke, Yale, Iowa, Melbourne,
Dublin’s Trinity College, and now Notre Dame. The author of Why Marx Was Right (2011) is a Marxist who has figured out how to make capitalism work for him. His Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) has sold many thousands of copies.
The opening chapter of the new book deals with some famous first words: the lead sentence of Pride and Prejudice, the first lines of Keats’s “To Autumn” and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the witches’ brew at the beginning of Macbeth.
Subsequent chapters deal with “Character,” “Narrative,” “Value,” and
“Interpretation,” with examples culled from works by an all-star roster
of writers (Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, the Brönte sisters, Evelyn Waugh)
with a ringer or two thrown in (nursery rhymes, Harry Potter).
Eagleton has a weakness for weird and gratuitous distinctions. “Sophocles,” he observes, “writes out of his own experience in Oedipus the King,
though it is unlikely that he was a blind, exiled, incestuous
parricide.” “Hamlet is non-realist because young men do not usually
speak in verse while berating their mothers or running a sword through
their prospective fathers-in-law. But the play is realistic in some more
subtle sense of the word.” The effort to appeal to a general audience
takes its toll: “Dostoyevski is better than [the novelist John] Grisham
in the sense that Tiger Woods is a better golfer than Lady Gaga.” Well,
yes, but the author also faults John Updike’s prose for drawing
“discreet attention to its own cleverness.” In contrast you might say
that some of Eagleton’s sentences draw indiscreet attention to their own
cleverness.
>>>>
Read the whole piece here.
