How to read literature

Eagleton (Univ. of Lancaster, UK) opens with a critique of those who have attempted to define literature based on the concept of essences--a set of features that all literary works have in common and without which the category of fiction has no meaning. He then argues that "Wittgenstein's theory of so-called family resemblances" provides an alternative to the all-or-nothing approach. He identifies five facets of literature--"the fictional, moral, linguistic, non-pragmatic, and normative"--in order to demonstrate that the facets are "porous, unstable, fuzzy at the edges, and tend to merge into their opposites or into each other." In chapter 4 he moves to a discussion of the philosophy of fiction, and in "Strategies," the fifth and concluding chapter, he shifts from literature to "theories that investigate it." He asserts that the concept of "strategy" can shed light on many of the theories. "Since this is relevant to so many kinds of literary theory, we have here what with suitable modesty might be called a Theory of (Almost) Everything, a literary equivalent to the physicist's elusive TOE." The book is witty and informative. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. W. F. Williams Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania

What, exactly, is literature? In his latest, Eagleton returns to familiar questions about the nature of literature and theory, extending and refining the thinking of his early landmark work, Literary Theory: An Introduction. In wry, thrifty prose, he surveys a range of theoretical positions in order to ponder a larger question about "whether there really are such things as common natures in the world." While he defends the major claim of his earlier work (that literature "has no essence whatsoever"), he brings to bear a variety of sources (such as scholastic debates between realism and nominalism and Wittgensteinian "language-games") in order to find a middle ground between the claim that literature has no essence and that the category of literature-indeed, the categorical impulse itself-still matters. He applies similar techniques in thinking about the nature of fiction, which, "despite its limits, can disclose possibilities beyond the actual." The book's last essay asks whether approaches to literature-like semiotics, feminism, and Marxism-possess a common nature and, if so, what that nature looks like. In order to address this question, Eagleton turns to "strategies," which he defines as ways of organizing reality capacious enough to allow for the complexities of "frictions and conflicts." These essays are a fascinating and often compelling expansion of Eagleton's oeuvre, though they may be most useful to those already familiar with the author's positions and theoretical biases. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.