My Five-Star Bookshelf, Part Five

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

It was with the reading of this book that I grew up intellectually.

Terry Eagleton is an astonishing critic. An inspired Marxist and breath-taking intellectual, he writes incisively and clearly about literature — text — as it affects our lived reality. You may think literature doesn't affect your lived reality. You are wrong, and Terry Eagleton will explain why — definitively, authoritatively.

The discipline of English — the realm that has held my conscious attention for nearly thirty years, and likely much longer than that at an unconscious level — is a construct. Prior to the late nineteenth century, the idea of seriously studying English — the poor man's classics — was laughable. Within a few decades — and here I paraphrase Eagleton — the idea of not studying English was laughable. What the construction of English as a discipline has meant, and what emerges from the way that discipline understands and talks about texts, affects our political economy in far-reaching, profound ways that I am still discovering. A lifetime of potential scholarship has sprung, in part, from this book.

As undergraduates in Honours English, we were required to take a fourth-year seminar in literary theory. For many of us, this course was a slog. Week after week after dreary week, we met to discuss yet another theorist, yet another theory; for many of my classmates — and for me at the time — this seminar was simply a requirement to fulfill. Looking back, though, I recognize how important literary theory has been to my academic work and even to my professional work. Today I am grateful I took that seminar, and even moreso that I discovered Literary Theory: An Introduction a few years later. Its twenty-fifth–anniversary edition was published a few years ago, so others too must feel it is a significant book.

With my doctorate finally completed, I can point to this book as one that truly changed my life.