Criticism: For readers who haven't the appetite for Terry Eagleton's bigger banquets, Figures of Dissent offers a buffet selection of his critical opinions from his literary journalism of the past decade or so.
Of the 41 essays collected here, more than half were first published in the London Review of Books, a journal he commends in his preface for providing a public forum in which one can "write companionably about complex matters". Lucidity and affability, the hallmarks of Eagleton's style, are certainly much in evidence here, so that even readers who may feel daunted at times by his conceptual intricacy will appreciate his sinuous, jargon-free prose.
Although some of these reviews have the air of obiter dicta jotted down during the intervals between monographs, all are marked by sharp insight and lively polemic. As a passionately partisan reviewer, Eagleton is less interested in dispensing carefully weighed aesthetic judgements than in getting down and dirty with his subjects. Doughty intellectual heavyweight that he is, he takes on all-comers, from Wittgenstein and T.S. Eliot to George Steiner and Seamus Heaney (though one wonders if it was an excess of chivalry that caused him to admit only two women to the ring).
Even the bantamweight David Beckham is subjected to a light pummelling for inflicting My World upon the public. "There could be no finer reason to buy this book than to sniff it," Eagleton tells football fetishists everywhere, adding that its author "runs the whole gamut of emotion from 'chuffed' to 'gutted' ".
Such satirical jibes, of course, are as much a feature of Eagleton's critical practice as his combative intelligence. As readers of these pages will know, he can turn a shapely sentence that is as witty as it is abrasive. Too much Wildean wordplay, however, makes for a certain argumentative glibness, a fault to which he is especially prone in some of his essays on Irish subjects. Similarly, his habit of debunking an argument by means of a rhetorical flourish ("A river does not flow as a sonnet does, nor does time fly like a goose") sometimes leads to banal statement rather than illuminating exposition. At his most critically engaged, however, Eagleton graces the reviewer's art with an elegant blend of synoptic erudition and intellectual acuity which is well beyond the reach of most literary academics.
Throughout this collection, Eagleton emerges as an embattled leftist radical championing the cause of political and intellectual activism in a cynically post- modern age. His advocacy of a practical political criticism makes him impatient with the jaded scepticism of a liberal intelligentsia and angry with those who would "culturalise" away economic realities or dissolve material forces into discourse. Jacques Derrida, his long-time nemesis, is predictably upbraided for his hollow relativism, as is the right-wing Stanley Fish for his macho postmodern posturing.
The left-wing Gayatri Spivak is attacked from the opposite flank, however, for failing to bolster her critique of Western liberalism with a socialist alternative. More fundamentally, Eagleton is dismayed by the lack of political radicalism behind the whole post-colonial project that Spivak represents. "Its flamboyant theoretical avant-gardism conceals a rather modest political agenda," he declares, a claim that will no doubt come as a surprise to those revisionists who detect the malign hand of nationalism behind every post-colonial intervention.
Such statements ultimately stem from Eagleton's profound disenchantment with the political and social irrelevance of much contemporary literary theory, a disaffection which is the signature of this collection. As far back as 1993, we find this apostle of theory in apostatic mode, bleakly contemplating the dystopia which he has ironically helped to create: "It is as though the theory is all in place, and all that remains to be done is run yet more texts through it."
Figures of Dissent bears witness to one of the most significant consequences of Eagleton's flight from such sterile critical practice: his renewed awareness of his intellectual birthright as a graduate of the Cambridge English school. In his preface he invokes the memory of F.R. Leavis and later, in a 1999 review originally entitled 'Cambridge in spite of Cambridge', pays tribute to the dissenting tradition of Leavis, William Empson and Raymond Williams, which was "neither dully conformist nor callowly iconoclastic".
To inherit this tradition is to transform it, and it is as a self-consciously radical traditionalist that Eagleton ultimately defines himself through this collection. The two figures of dissent whom he most admires here are Colin MacCabe and Stuart Hall, the former for bringing the study of new media technologies into fruitful conjunction with traditional literary pursuits, the latter for applying high theory to diverse forms of popular culture. Between them they embody Eagleton's ideal of the left-wing intellectual as a strategic, Janus-faced mediator between the academic and the demotic spheres, a role he himself continues to perform with indefatigable zest.
Liam Harte lectures in the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster
Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others
By Terry Eagleton, Verso, 272pp, £15