Aspects Of Eagleton's Literary Theory

Eagleton is a famous western Marxist literary theorist and cultural theorist,who has made huge contributions to the development of literary and cultural theory.The purpose of this paper is to systematically present and study his literary,mainly divided into three parts.The introduction part introduces the Eagleton's life and his academic course,the research background,purpose and significance.Besides,the current situation at home and abroad is briefly reviewed.This paper has four parts,mainly analyzing the Eagleton literary and cultural theory from four aspects as follows:the view of literary essence,the literary production theory,the literary criticism and cultural theory.The first chapter is the Eagleton's view of literary essence,which discusses his different views about the literary essence before and after the 21st century.Before the 21st century,he thought the literature had no fixed nature,like the weeds.While the 21st century later he has turns to the nature stance of the anti-essentialism and concluded the five literary universals by using the terms from the medieval scholasticism.The second chapter is the Eagleton literary production theory.The part analyzes all his kinds of relevant points,including the literature being ideology and the formal ideology.What's more,the production on aesthetic ideology is also discussed and it points out that the Eagleton literary production is not only as a general social material production,but also a particularly aesthetic ideology production due to the intervention of the author's ideology and aesthetic ideology.Furthermore,the literary production theory is a result of the combined multiple factors,such as the mode of general production,the literary production,the general ideology,the author's ideology,the aesthetic ideology and text,which criticizes the literary view of creationism and the theory of reflection.The third chapter is the Eagleton literary criticism view.First of all,It is states that the four modes of Marxist literary criticism like anthropology,politics,ideology and economy and the Eagleton's view that all criticism is political criticism.Then,I analyze the Eagleton's opinion about the critical function,who thinks the criticism has no end and the function of criticism is to experience,imagine and make valuable judgments about works.Finally,the dialectical sequence in Eagleton literary criticism is explained from the three aspects of subjectivity and objectivity,micro and macro,and the form and history.The fourth chapter is the Eagleton's cultural theory.It is mainly from the three aspects,the criticism for post-modernism,the idea of culture and after theory for analysis.From the point of Eagleton's view,the post-modernism is the end and revolt of the modernism,but there is some relationship between them.He is very of critical of the post-modernism respectively from the five points of the anti-totality,the anti-continuity,the view of body,the anti-class and anti-essence.As for the Eagleton's view of culture,I discuss his dialectics of culture,including the culture and nature,the culture,nature and body and the culture and society,etc.Then,his theory of the cultural crises and wars are expounded.At last,he advocates to a kind of common culture,which can only be only achieved in the socialism.The aspect after theory analyzes that Eagleton has theoretical reflection from the two ways of the rise and fall with the gain and loss of theory,who is not satisfied with the situation where the present cultural theory does not care about the basic things in life and puts forward his own remedies which require the cultural theory gets involved in the reality and make the politically practical function so that is can provide a feasible way for the after theory.The conclusion part mainly analyzes the contributions and deficiencies of the Eagleton literary and cultural theory.Its contributions mainly embody in enriching and developing the Marxist literary and cultural theory,the criticism of the capitalist society and the enlightenment of Chinese literary theory.The insufficient points include too thick political color of literary and cultural theory,the utopia color and the contradiction between his discussions.