Product Description

Today the barriers between high and low culture have crumbled, but, as Terry Eagleton's book asks: does this mean our obsession with "culture" has overtaken everything else? Can we still be politically engaged in today's freewheeling, postmodern era? How is it possible to justify studying "Friends" when half the world's population survives on less than two dollars a day? What kind of fresh thinking does today's urgent global situation demand? Terry Eagleton's work "Literary Theory" inspired a generation and established him as one of the leading thinkers of the Left. In this book he argues that the age of "high" theory has come to a close - and looks at what ought to follow. Tracing the rise and fall of theory from the 1960s to the 1990s, Eagleton explores the cultural and political factors that brought it to birth, examining how path-breaking writers such as Barthes, Foucault, Lacan and Kristeva brought subjects like gender, power, sexuality and ethnicity out of the margins. He offers a candid assessment of the gains and losses of cultural theory, rebutting many of the standard charges against it, but claiming also that it has been silent or evasive about a whole range of vital issues. "After Theory" concludes with the dramatic suggestion that, in the face of a new global narrative of capitalism, postmodernism may now be dead. Instead, the areas that cultural theory has overlooked or denied - love, evil, death, morality, metaphysics, religion and revolution - must urgently be engaged with. As this impassioned, radical treatise on the modern age shows, they matter now more than ever.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #922348 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

About the Author
Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester University. His books include Literary Theory, a trilogy on Irish culture, a novel, several plays, the screenplay for Derek Jarman's film Wittgenstein, and an autobiography, The Gatekeeper (Penguin 2001).

Customer Reviews

The Theory of Today: Wars, Capitalism and the Totalitarian Regime
After Theory is highly a significant piece of document to read. Some academicians read it and criticize it for its playfulness and its weakness to find a real solution to the problems that face us today. Eagleton is at least pointing out the "questions" one must follow, in order to face the politics of contemporary culture; this may be capitalism, totalitarianism or could be narcissism "western narcissism involved in working on the history of pubic hair while half the world's population lacks adequate sanitation and survives on less than two dollars a day" (Eagleton, p.6) With this brief quaotation, he is simply saying that a theory that wants to change the world should implement a Marxist agenda. Otherwise, it would prove nothing about humanity in general. In other words, in the words of Derrida, "there is no future without Marx". Other than that, he is funny, entertaining and outstandingly political writer. Every student of literature should read After Theory and must come up with something new: something to face the problems of todays world - wars around the world, America's hypocritical politics about terrorism and so forth. Briefly, perhaps what After Theory is suggesting is that literature/theory must not be detached from the politics of our world.

Highly recommended...

Enlightening read
To a certain extent I agree with some of the other reviewers who have complained that Eagleton is all over the place with this book. But it's a hell of a big subject he has chosen to tackle - and inevitably he has aimed for brevity and clarity over completeness.

It's certainly the only book on cultural theory that I have read as a general reader that is witty, thought-provoking and (best of all) understandable.

I read this on a cramped trans-atlantic flight with a 21 month baby asleep on my lap and zipped through it. The number of exciting ideas Eagleton throws up is huge and well worth the cover price.

plagued by vagueness
I'm a Eagleton "fan", if you judge him to have sufficient celebrity to make that possible. I was introduced to his work via Ideology of the Aesthetic as an undergraduate, and I've always been eager to read his pieces when they appear in the popular press. Although I don't go in for it much, I did read The Gatekeeper, which was a entertaining account of his childhood and later life, which contained a good dose of first-hand accounts of the silliness (and seriousness) of liberal theory and practice.

I also have more than a passing interest in high theory, and I've read (and enjoyed) Foucalt, Adorno, Heidegger, Deluze, as well as their acolytes like critic Stephen Greenblatt and philosopher Slavoj Zizek. So I was excited to read After Theory. Here we go, I thought -- a first rate mind comes up against a first rate problem: the status of critical theory in the next generation, and its relationship to the larger culture. Sufficiently excited, even, to order the book from the UK (I'm in the States, and it won't come out here until March 2004.)

I'm incredibly disappointed with "After Theory." It is one long ramble about the history of the world and the history of theory (two things with quite different time spans.) There is next-to-zero citation from theorists to illustrate the rather contentious things Eagleton might say at times about the "true nature" of some theorist's project. There is precious little evidence at all, really, and little argumentative effort invested.

Instead, After Theory rambles like a tourist bus through various hot spots (9/11, WTO protests, conferences on masturbation, ill defined groups of hungry people in Africa), pausing only to issue a vague judgement or two before shuttling you on to somewhere else. Eagleton has lost the ability to distinguish between start and finish in the broad sense where you try to derive an interesting point from something apparently less interesting.

I call it the "Brazil or Indonesia" style of writing. More than once in his chapters (more than once on a page, sometimes), Eagleton will say something very vague and tack on "in Brazil or Indonesia." (Well, sometimes it's Kenya or Indonesia, or Kenya and Ulster -- you get the point.) The problem is that Brazil and Indonesia are (to put it mildly) very different places, and anything you say about the nature of culture or politics that applies to both places is either trivial or contentious or flat out wrong.

So, sadly: give this one a miss.