Terry eagleton what is literature

Principles of Management. A Review of Scenario Planning Literature. A Review of the Professional and Acad The rhetoric of conspiracy - Theories What is Literature? Die Diktatur des Lesers. Analyse und Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home What is literature according to Terry Eagleton? Ben Davis May 29, What is literature according to Terry Eagleton? Why does Eagleton conclude in his essay that there is no objective definition of literature? How does Eagleton Summarise the tenets of formalism?

Who has introduced the term anxiety of influence? Who coined the term New Historicism? What is new historicism literary theory? He cites example of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry in which both the structure of the word and its meaning are shown significant. Realizing how complex language is, Eagleton states that language is also manipulated according to readers' need and demand.

Moving on, Eagleton focuses on the reception of text. He brings out the importance of writer's perspectives, background and the context of the text but the ultimate authority lies with the reader. Readers may not read a text the way its writer wants and therefore all the literary theories and standard definitions of literature are of no use.

They can probably show the path on which readers can choose to walk but not the whole way. While post-structuralists do accentuate 'Deconstruction' and the fact that there is no transcendental meaning, Eagleton reasserts that literary theory is always political and that even their theory is not without concealed biases.

With this the circle come to a close when Eagleton finally concludes that literature is too idiosyncratic to define. The problem with this way of defining is that non-practicality of a text cannot be defined objectively. Which means that it depends on how a reader prefers to read the text. A reader can prefer to read Gibbon's account of Roman empire for information or prose style and so on. Consider literature as being a highly valued kind of writing. If this were true, then any writing can be considered as literature.

For me a letter written by my mother to be will hold a value higher than any piece of writing by Shakespeare. Therefore a value given to any writing must be subjective.

Values on the other hand are variable and change from time to time. There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about it. Yet here he also says that value- judgements are unstable does not mean that they are subjective.

Value-judgements depends on the value system and social ideologies that one belongs to. For conclusion please read the last paragraph of the essay.