The Rise of English by Terry Eagleton A Brief Summary

“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.