The Study Of Eagleton’s Postmodernism Cultural Political Criticism Theory

Postmodernism not only has challenged modernity, but also challenged marxism. As a self-conscious marxist, hence Eagleton has to intensely critic postmodernism. He argues that the beginnings of postmodernism reduce to the failure of west radical political movements in the 1960s, so that Eagleton critic postmodernism from the perspective of cultural political criticism, discovering that the essence of radical postmodernism is conservative. As an excellent case, Eagleton’s overtly political position, firm socialism faith, adept reasoning strategy are benificial to us. Although current domestic academic community has deeply studied the criticism of Eagleton’s postmodernism theory, there are still some insufficient. So that it is necessary to continue to study it. This article consists of three chapters.Chapter 1 mainly discusses eagleton’s critical perspective of postmodernism. This chapter mainly studies three questions. The first question:why does Eagleton participate in the debate on postmodernism? Postmodernism is radical, rebelling against unreasonable system of capitalism, and Eagleton should praise postmodernism, why,however, Eagleton deny postmodernism? Mainly because postmodernism revolt against marxism and modernity, and rebel agains essentialism, totality, classism and so on. This action not only has broken down the basis of its opponents but also collapsed its own basis, so that postmodernists lost the power against the unreasonable reality. The second question:who are the imaginary opponents of Eagleton’s theory? Domestic researches have focused on the concept of postmodernism, but I think that we could not grasp Eagleton’s intentions without understand Eagleton’s imaginary opponents. The imaginary opponents shall contain some leftists who has shared some thonghts with postmodernists and some kinds of radical postmodernists. The third question:why does Eagleton arbitrarily draw conclusion that the beginnings of postmodernism are the failure of radical political movements in the 1960s? Eagleton rebels against reductionism, but he directly reduces the beginnings of postmodernism to the failure of radical political movements, why? There is a strategic consideration. Through reducing the beginnings of postmodernism to the defeat of political movements, so Eagleton could debate the question in the perspective of political criticism.Chapter 2 mainly discusses the content of Eagleton’s postmodernism criticism. This chapter mainly includes two parts, namely the postmodernism criticism of the styles of thoughts and the idea of culture. Domestic scholars alwags focus on the fist part and neglect the latter. According to the concept of postmodernism defined by eagleton, we shall focus on postmodernism and postmodernity at the same time, in order to grasp Eagleton’s intentions. These two aspects has been mainly discussed in The illusion of Postmodernism and The Idea of Culture. So that I would debate these two aspects mainly based on these two books.Chapter 3 mainly discusses the political tendency of Eagleton’s postmodernism criticism. Throught debatement, Eagleton realises the conservative nature of postmodernism, which has no good political prospects. So what is Eagleton’s solution? Eagleton argues that it is socialist grand narrative that can work through postmodernism. Postmodernism is the conbination of the bad aspects of liberalism and communitarianism, while socialism is the combination of the good aspects of liberalism and communitarianism, so that socialism is a promising scheme. Then how to arrive in socialist society? Eagleton argues that we should return to grand narrative which gets ethics, politics, aesthetics and practice together.The part of Conclusions mainly concisely summarizes The study of Eagleton’s postmodernism cultural political criticism theory. At the same time, it also discusses the peculiarity of Eagleton’s postmodernism criticism theory, comparing Eagleton with Lyotard, Habermas, and Jameson. Finally, it also reflects on the deficiency of Eagleton’s postmodernism criticism.