“The Rise of English”- by Terry Eagleton
In eighteenth-century England,
literature was considered to be that which conformed to the standards of
‘polite letters’, meaning that which embodied the values and tastes of the
upper classes (usually). After the bloody civil war of the previous
century, literature became even more important in bringing the middle classes
into unity with the upper classes.
Literature, in the modern sense, really
emerged around the nineteenth century during the Romantic period; the idea that
literature is something imaginative or inventive while prosaic writing is dull
or uninspiring is a relatively new concept in history.
During the Romantic period, types of
literature like poetry no longer were simply a technical way of writing, they
had significant social, political, and philosophical implications (many major
Romantic poets were political activists themselves). The stress upon the
sovereignty and autonomy of the imagination was another emphasis finding its
way into the concept of literature. The rise of the ‘symbol’ also came
towards the end of the eighteenth century; with it, various contradictory
concepts could finally be captured together.
Literature, as defined by Eagleton
earlier, is an ideology. Eagleton suggests that the growth of English
studies in the later nineteenth century was caused by the failure of religion,
something he believes was a very simple yet powerful form of ideology that was
above all else a pacifying influence. Apparently, English literature worked
as a suitable replacement. English became a subject used to cultivate the
middle class and infuse them with some values of the leftover aristocracy; thus
English literature became the new way to pacify the working and middle
classes. Literature would convey timeless truths and distract the masses
from their present commitments and conditions; it was also a way to experience
things or events that were not possible to experience in a person’s life.
English as an academic subject was nothing more than the poor man’s
Classics. In addition, English became the new vehicle for transferring
the moral law, which was no longer taken from religion.
Because English was not exactly
considered a ‘real’ subject, it was often given to the ladies of higher
learning institutions when were now grudgingly admitting women; however, as the
century drew on, English took on more of a masculine aspect. It still
took a while for the study of English to be taken seriously, but finally
English literature came into power, mostly because of wartime
nationalism. The new subject was created by the offspring of the
bourgeoisie, rather than those who currently held social power.
Now the study of English was ‘in’, and
people may have wondered how it had ever been otherwise. Deep and intense
questions became subject to the most intense scrutiny. Literature was
also perhaps the only place where creative language was allowed to
flourish. In addition, those studying felt that they were a part of a
larger movement that was moving civilization back to the way it should have
been, as in the seventeenth century.
“Scrutiny” didn’t seek to change
society in any way; rather, their goal was to withstand it. Teaching
children about the corrupt culture they lived in was very important, instead of
making them memorize pointless passages of literature. Eagleton said that
the Scrutiny project was “hair-raisingly radical and really rather
absurd.” In the end, Scrutiny was simply a project of the elitists.
The ‘organic’ society desired by Scrutiny was unobtainable, nothing more than a
lofty desire to reclaim the golden days of the past.
Some types of English were considered
more English than others, which ironically reminds one of the types of
arguments given by the upper class before. When T.S. Eliot came to
England, he upgraded the status of the poets and dramatists while toppling
Milton and the Romantics. Literature becomes that which has the Tradition
flowing through it; all poetry may be literature, but not all poetry may be
Literature. Eliot thought that middle-class liberalism had failed in
light of the war, and a poet must develop a new type of sensory language in
poetry that would speak to a person’s senses rather than their intellect.
Many contradictions began showing up in the ideas that the ‘big wigs’ of
Literature of that day came up with.
Practical criticism meant a method that
was unafraid to take a text apart, but also assumed that you could judge
literary greatness by focusing on pieces of poetry or prose isolated from their
cultural contexts. Close reading also mean detailed analytic
interpretation, but also seemed to imply that former methods of criticism read
only three words per line. Also assumed that any literary work could be
understood in isolation from its context.
Richards, an advocate of modern
science, felt that, even though he himself felts questions such as ‘what?’ or
‘why?’ were not valid, if pseudo-answers were not given to such
pseudo-questions, society would fall apart. Poetry’s role is to supply
such answers.
American New Criticism was deeply
marked by the doctrines that organizing lawless lower human impulses more
effectively will ensure the survival of the higher finer ones (not too
dissimilar from the old Victorian belief that organizing the lower classes will
ensure the survival of the upper ones). New Criticism was not too
different from Scrutiny: it reinvented in literature what it couldn’t find in
reality. They came up with something called the Great Man theory of
literature, which says that even if the author’s intentions in writing were
recovered, they were of no relevance to the interpretation of his or her
text. At the same time, neither could the emotional responses of readers
be confused with the poem’s true meaning. Ultimately, reading poetry in
the New Critical way meant committing yourself to nothing, a rejection of
anything in particular.
Special Note: “The Rise of English” is
an outstanding essay where Eagleton surveys how the concept of literature as we
understand today has developed, how its studies have begun academically and how
literary criticism in English has evolved. He discloses the capitalist motif
behind using English as an academic discipline in British colonies. As a
post-modern theorist, Eagleton elaborately discusses the drawbacks of New
Criticism and paves the way forward to look at the literary texts with newer
insight. However, in the essay “The Rise of English” he
criticises the theoretical development in the English up to the New Criticism phase.
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