After Theory

As heralded everywhere from NPR to the pages of the New York Times Magazine, a new era is underway in our colleges and universities: after a lengthy tenure, the dominance of postmodern theory has come to an end. In this timely and topical book, the legendary Terry Eagleton ("one of [our] best-known public intellectuals."-Boston Globe) traces the rise and fall of these ideas from the 1960s through the 1990s, candidly assessing the resultant gains and losses. What's needed now, After Theory argues, is a return to the big questions and grand narratives. Today's global politics demand we pay attention to a range of topics that have gone ignored by the academy and public alike, from fundamentalism to objectivity, religion to ethics. Fresh, provocative, and consistently engaging, Eagleton's latest salvo will challenge everyone looking to better grasp the state of the world.

The next big statement from one of our foremost radical intellectuals, announcing the end of the postmodern era-and the start of the next big way to think about the world we face today.

Library Journal

Contending that we are living in the aftermath of "high theory," Eagleton, the author of the highly popular and groundbreaking Literary Theory: An Introduction, bemoans the current state of cultural studies, wryly noting that while "students once wrote uncritical, reverential essays on Flaubert nowadays they write uncritical, reverential essays on Friends." Marxism, hermeneutics, and semiotics are no longer sexy academic topics, he warns. They have, instead, yielded to a fascination with sex. Students now "huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism, eye-gouging, cyborgs, and porno movies." The democratic impetus behind much cultural study-that because they reflect the everyday life of common people, Survivor and Jay-Z are as worthy of serious study as Sophocles and Joyce-seems appealing, but the Marxist Eagleton cannot reconcile studying "the history of pubic hair while half the world's population lacks adequate sanitation and survives on less than two dollars a day." As always, Eagleton is witty and convincing in his argument that theory should be addressing more important issues in a post-9/11 world politically dominated by a high-handed U.S. administration and terrorist threats. In the end, however, his study offers surprisingly little beyond standard Bush-bashing and repetitive anticapitalist rants. Alas, what could have been great cultural criticism with broad appeal falls short.-William D. Walsh, Georgia State Univ., Atlanta Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester University. He is the author of Literary Theory, several plays, a trilogy on Irish culture, the screenplay for Derek Jarman's film Wittgenstein, and many other books. He is also a frequent contributor to Harper's, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books.