Marxist update: Five who made a revolution

Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read (2022) is an accessible book. In it, Terry Eagleton celebrates five teachers and their methods. Describing them, Eagleton also elucidates some of what has gone to make him such a clear, useful critic.

* * *

Only world- spanning upheavals, making it impossible for old classes and their ideas to rule in same old ways, can explain the development of new approaches to literature, to say nothing of the development of new critics themselves.

Missing from Eagleton's book is any attempt to portray intellectual ferment in the most revolutionary historical period in Europe since 1789-1799: the epoch of world revolution inaugurated by the Bolsheviks in 1917.

* * *

Eagleton is not a man of 1917. For him, the moment of reception for new-old 1920s methods of critique was the conservatized status quo of the circa-1968 UK labor movement. Radicalizations and shifts in mass psychology were for workers, students, and intelligentsia in other parts of the world.

Worse, Eagleton was politically miseducated in Tony Cliff's International Socialists organization, a UK approximation to the US groups formed around renegades like Max Schachtman, who consciously rejected the program and principles of the Communist International in Lenin's Time. (This shortcoming can still be seen at work in Eagleton's most politically worthless book, 2011's Why Marx Was Right).

For Eagleton's critical revolutionaries, the political landscape could not have been more different. Eliot, Richards, Empson, Leavis, and Williams grew up in a pre-1914 US and UK; their early careers began after the war, and after the triumph of Bolshevism. As each critic wrangled with and often rejected ongoing radicalizations and national independence struggles, they also wrangled with and "made new" a struggle with words and their use, exploring contradictions of tragedy, poetry, and fiction. The youngest critic in the book's cohort, Raymond Williams, ultimately pushed on from print and into an analysis of TV drama.

* * *

Links to my reading notes and excerpts posted last week on Facebook can be found below:

Introduction

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5316691101726368&id=100001565934753

1 T.S. Eliot

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5316730228389122&id=100001565934753

2 I.A. Richards

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5316768231718655&id=100001565934753

3 William Empson

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5316771735051638&id=100001565934753

4 F.R. Leavis

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5318383181557160&id=100001565934753