Culture Culture Everywhere

Ending with Eagleton’s After Theory for this class’s last reading (sympathetic sigh) was a great way to have some closure on the content of this course. I, like I’m sure many people in the class did, enjoyed his use of style and voice as he sumed up the decades of theory and intellectual movements in a scholarly and witty manner that can only be articulated in the knowledge of hindsight. The new theory at hand seems to be better than the previous: “There was a general excited sense that the present was the place to be” (24). We don’t know if it works until we try it, then we can rag on it years later, much like disco.

The similes and out-of-left-field analogies that Eagleton sprinkles throughout the text were particularly entertaining to me: “In certain postmodern quarters, the word ‘progress’ is greeted with scorn usually reserved for those who believe that the face of Elvis Presley keeps mysteriously showing up on chocolate chip cookies” (179) . Anyone who spits a little pop reference to The Simpsons, Brad Pitt, Satan, George Bush, Mick Jagger, Elvis and Four Weddings and a Funeral all in the same piece has captured my attention.

The territory that Eagleton covers is immense, to say the least, so I cannot in a sober state attempt to highlight all pivotal excerpts. I can, however, speak about what Eagleton reinforces about the achievements of cultural theory: “it has disabused us of the idea that there is a single correct way to interpret a work of art” (95)—which is what got me into teaching and continuing my education in the first place. This doesn’t mean that “anything can mean anything”, but the freedom of this idea of interpretation is appealing and desirable for people as opposed to a fettered approach preached by authorities. If evidence exists to support a meaning, in a comprehensible and traceable manner, your claim is feasible. That is exactly why I am not a Math teacher.

“To be inside and outside a position at the same time—to occupy territory while loitering skeptically on the boundary—is often where the most intensely creative ideas stem from” (40).