A Study On Eagleton's Cultural Criticism

In the contemporary western ideological circle,Eagleton was a very important English literary theorist,cultural critic and Marxist theorist after Williams,who had world influence in literature,aesthetics and other fields.After the new millennium,he had been expanding in the field of cultural criticism,and his philosophy had attracted people's wide attention.This article holds that Eagleton's research topic had changed greatly,which reflected in the transformation from ideological criticism to cultural criticism,and the emergence of theological or “metaphysical” transformation,all of which were different aspects of this process.With After Theory(2003)and The Idea of Culture(2000)as the main marks of the beginning of this change,Eagleton's thoughts of cultural criticism were mainly scattered in nearly 10 works,and this article makes a preliminary overall analysis and evaluation.Eagleton's thought of cultural criticism originated from a situation,in which the essence of infidelity in capitalist society was getting worse,the unfair politics in capitalist countries had aroused horrible and evil phenomena,and socialism and the Left Movement in the western world had been at a low ebb for a long period of time.Its main theoretical sources were Classical Marxism,Aristotle's eudemonism,Christian theology,Nietzschean philosophy and British Cultural Marxism.Eagleton examined the multiple meanings of culture in detail,analyzed the connection and conflicts of five cultural forms and the contemporary general culture and cultural disputes,elaborated the basic cultural relations between culture and civilization,culture and nature,culture and power.He proposed the important “Ethics-Politics” Manifesto aiming at the cultural theory's neglect of the politics and the defects of the study of Left Movement.Taking this manifesto as the general outline,Eagleton systematically analyzed the culturalphenomena in capitalist societies and its close relationship with the serious defects of the capitalist system,represented by “Heretical Tetralogy”-terror,tragedy,evil and Christianity,with the hard exploration of nearly 10 works in the past 20 years.Eagleton advocated to cultivate the new socialist subject with “Physical Materialism”and reshaping the meaning of life.He revealed that the capitalist mass culture is a kind of illusory common culture.In the comparison between Eliot and Williams on the common cultural thought,he expounded the build path of the socialist common culture,that is,under the principle of equality and unity,the mass cooperates to create the socialist common culture.His cultivation of the new socialist subject and common cultural thought constructed “The Survival Way of the New Socialist Culture”.The value of Eagleton's cultural criticism mainly lies in opening up a form of cultural criticism with distinct dialectical,political and practical features,forming the innovative achievements of Marxist cultural theory,and “The Survival Way of the New Socialist Culture” becoming the innovative path to promote the free and all-round development of human beings.There are also some important enlightenment of Eagleton's cultural criticism on Chinese cultural development.The theoretical limits are mainly reflected in the lack of firm stance on the basic principles of Marxism,and several deviations in understanding the scope and function of faith.This study is a systematic philosophical study of Eagleton's cultural criticism,which helps to highlight the theme and overall context of Eagleton's thought after the new millennium,form a general grasp,change the relative dispersion of Eagleton's cultural critical research themes and the lack of philosophical research,and enrich the study of British Cultural Marxism.The study can effectively reveal the prominent cultural contradictions in western capitalist society and the separation of facts and values,which has a positive enlightenment on the real hot and difficult points,such as the elimination of evil,terror and nihilism.