Status Updates From Literary Theory: An Introdu...

As much as I would love to binge-read... it is exhausting! Loving it so far though.

New insult unlocked: being a Leavisite

I gotta admit: reading Eagleton feels a lot like taking a bite of the forbidden fruit at the Garden of Eden, and then finally seeing your own nakedness. The analysis is quite uncomfortable but also really dead-on.

The actually impoverished experience of the mass of people, an impoverishment bred by their social conditions, can be supplemented by literature: instead of working to change such conditions (which Arnold, to his credit, did more thoroughly than almost any of those who sought to inherit his mantle), you can vicariously fulfil someone's desire for a fuller life by handing them Pride and Prejudice. -- holy shit

"...but the effect of aesthetics was to suppress these historical differences. Art was extricated from the material practices, social relations and ideological meanings in which it is always caught up, and raised to the status of a solitary fetish." which sadly is a point that Saunders missed in A Swim in a Pond huhuhuhu

Yun oh, historical materialism

Eagleton refuses to form a fixed definition of "literature" but tinkers with some necessary ideas related to value-judgement

I found a stack of books from college wasting away in a cardboard box in my closet, and this was among them. I want to get into more literary criticism anyway, so, here we are.