The opinion of terry eagleton on structuralism in fictional and scientific literature

Share via Email For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life. One might make an honourable exception of Harold Pinter, who has wisely decided that being a champagne socialist is better than being no socialist at all; but his most explicitly political work is also his most artistically dreary. David Hare caved in to the blandishments of Buckingham Palace some years ago, moving from radical to reformist.

He argues that these oppositions cannot be simply transcended; given the thousands of years of philosophical history behind them, it would be disingenuous to attempt to move directly to a domain of thought beyond these distinctions.

So, construction first attempts to compensate for these historical power imbalances, undertaking the difficult project of thinking through the philosophical implications of questioning and presenting complications to show the contingency of such divisions.

A toolbox for analysing political texts

The second way involves the emergence or eruption of a new conception. One can begin to conceive a conceptual terrain away from these oppositions: Derrida spoke in an interview first published in French in about such "concepts," which he called merely "marks" in order to distinguish them from proper philosophical concepts: This is often given as a major reason for the difficult writing style of deconstructive texts.

Critics of deconstruction find this unacceptable as philosophy; many feel that, by working in this manner with unspecified terms, deconstruction ignores the primary task of philosophy, which they say is the creation and elucidation of concepts.

This deep criticism is a result of a fundamental difference of opinion about the nature of philosophy, and is unlikely to be resolved simply. Text and deconstruction According to deconstructive readers, one of the phallogocentrisms of modernism is the distinction between speech logos and writing, with writing historically being thought of as derivative to logos.

As part of subverting the presumed dominance of logos over text, Derrida argued that the idea of a speech-writing dichotomy contains within it the idea of a very expansive view of textuality that subsumes both speech and writing. According to Derrida, "There is nothing outside of the text.

In a sense, deconstruction is simply a way to read text as broadly defined ; any deconstruction has a text as its object and subject.

This accounts for deconstruction's broad cross-disciplinary scope. Deconstruction has been applied to literature, art, architecture, science, mathematics, philosophyand psychologyand any other disciplines that can be thought of as involving the act of marking.

References:

In deconstruction, text can be thought of as "dead," in the sense that once the markings are made, the markings remain in suspended animation and do not change in themselves. Thus, what an author says about his text doesn't revive it, and is just another text commenting on the original, along with the commentary of others.

In this view, when an author says, "You have understood my work perfectly," this utterance constitutes an addition to the textual system, along with what the reader said was understood in and about the original text, and not a resuscitation of the original dead text.

The reader has an opinion, the author has an opinion.

Terry Eagleton and Literature Theory - Sample Essays

Communication is possible not because the text has a transcendental signification, but because the brain tissue of the author contains similar "markings" as the brain tissue of the reader. These brain markings, however, are unstable and fragmentary. Structuralist analysis generally relies on the search for underlying binary oppositions as an explanatory device.

Deconstruction challenges the explanatory value of these oppositions but does not seek to abolish them. There are three moments to deconstruction, which may be mixed and simultaneous: The revelation of an asymmetry in the binary opposition, suggesting an implied hierarchy. The failure of the hierarchy:Literary Theory: An Introduction - Chapter 4, Post-Structuralism Summary & Analysis Terry Eagleton This Study Guide consists of approximately 46 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Literary Theory.

In Literary Theory: an Introduction (, revised ), 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 regardbouddhiste.com mater: Trinity College, Cambridge. Terry Eagleton: British literature's long and rich tradition of politically engaged writers has come to an end.

Opinion The Guardian view · Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor professor. Professor Terry Eagleton, Chair within the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, began his academic life as a Victorianist, and is still interested in the history and literature of the nineteenth century, as well as in 20th-century literature.

Prior to his move to. Stuart Kelly wrestles with Terry Eagleton's theory of literature. The Event of Literature by Terry Eagleton – review They mean by 'literary' a work which is fictional, or which yields. If the first edition of Terry Eagleton's book Literary Theory had been published twenty years earlier, I might have read and understood it (a real long shot!) and learned that the professor was a Leavasite.

as text to be interpreted and understood using tools once artificially reserved for literature. Eagleton's understanding of all this is 4/5(58).