The Illusions of Postmodernism [Paperback]

Terry Eagleton (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0631203230 | ISBN-13: 978-0631203230 | Publication Date: December 31, 1996 | Edition: 1

In this brilliant critique, Terry Eagleton explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. Above all he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Eagleton shows his firm grasp of political tactics and knowledge of history. It is exceptional" Steven Donovan

From the Back Cover

This brilliant critique explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. His primary concern is less with the more intricate formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu of postmodernism as a whole. Above all he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought.

Although Professor Eagleton's view of the topic is, as he says, generally a negative one, he points to postmodernism's strengths as well as its failings. He sets out not just to expose the illusions of postmodernism but to show the students he has in mind that they never believed what they thought they believed in the first place. In the process his gifts for irony and satire sharpen the reader's pleasure, and his commitment to the ethical and the vision of a just society, inspire engagement and "a refusal to acquiesce in the appalling mess which is the contemporary world".

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (December 31, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0631203230
• ISBN-13: 978-0631203230
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.5 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #319,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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108 of 118 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Refreshingly LEFTIST critique of PoMo, July 14, 2001

By 

John Ronald (Sugar Land, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Illusions of Postmodernism (Paperback)

Let me begin by confessing a bias--I positively love Terry Eagleton as a critic and writer. His _Intro to Literary Theory_ is amazingly lucid and influenced me a great deal.

I was first exposed to PoMo while working on an MA in German Studies @ Rice University. It was a subject I had never before confronted in my undergrad years. I walked into my first Intro to PoMo class a naive optimist and humanist and naive beliver in the Enlightenment tradition. Needless to say I was thrown for a heavy loop...PoMo utterly overwhelmed me, scrambled my brains, and in no small measure derailed my MA thesis for at least a year, trying to wrap my mind around this difficult subject. I felt a gut-level dislike of J.F. Lyotard and an immediate affinity for J. Habermas. Among PoMo writers, I felt most attracted to F. Jameson, who, of whom, of course, we got the least coverage in my class.

In many ways, Eagleton picks up where Jameson leaves off. Both are conscientious Marxist theorists who offer a welcome critque of PoMo from a Leftist perspective that I can embrace as opposed to the usual gamut of Right-Wing/Conservative PoMo bashing ala Alan Bloom, et. al. that I only partially can stomach and tends to leave me cold. In defense of PoMo's positive aspects, I highly recommend the writings of US Professors Michael Berube and Cary Nelson.

But Eagleton is a mint...a unabashed socialist from Britain, a true cultural heir of Orwell, I think...He and fellow Briton Christopher Norris both offer solid, fair critques of PoMo free of Rightist blather.

Eagleton gives the best of PoMo its due, but also takes it to task time and time again, often quite humorously with intellectual irony.

I recall reading _Teach Yourself Postmodernism_ and enjoying its solid critques of the failings of (classical) Modernism, but then it wandered off into advanced PoMo and I found myself dismayed, watching my sympthies dry up and evaporate as the elucidation of PoMo drifted from Modernist critque to positive assertions about PoMo that struck me as so wrong-headed. Eagleton points out in detail and says more eloquently than I could muster, just what is "wrong w/ PoMo"... (Norris does an equally fine job, too, i might add).

Eagleton in a number of ways reminds me of Noam Chomsky's response to PoMo. But whereas Chomsky is utterly dismissive of PoMo, Eagleton at least engages it forwardly, gives it a fair hearing.

Anyhow...This latest book by Terry Eagleton, it has much to recommend it. Enjoy!

-JJR

51 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Despite Samson, the Temple Stands, September 1, 2003

By 

Douglas Doepke (Claremont, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Illusions of Postmodernism (Paperback)

This is not a scholarly work (few footnotes), but it does make scholarly demands.The reader needs to know a lot about postmodernism and Marxism before picking it up , because Eagleton doesn't fill in the background. In short, the book does not serve as a primer. Still, pomo is a big subject and this is a slender volume, so a lot gets left out. Individual thinkers like Derrida, Kristeva, Lyotard and the usual suspects, are replaced by a popular view or what Eagleton calls the "sensibility of postmodernism as a whole." (p.viii). This amounts to a corporate image, a synthesis of the movement as a whole -- but is the synthesis really a straw man, a travesty of the real thing? On that, the reader will have to judge for herself; in any case fidelity to the originators is really not the point. Eagleton is not interested in what these thinkers precisely think or say. Instead, he's interested in what people believe pomo says, and just as importantly, in the kind of society that popularizes a pomo sensibility. His aim, therefore, is more about society and politics than which thinker said what and when. This is consistent with his Marxism, which is not much interested in where an idea comes from, but instead how it affects where society is going.

But, given the eclipse of international socialism, who cares what Marx or socialists say. Even postmodernism, Marxism's quandom successor, celebrates the god of the free market; so who cares. Well, as Eagleton points out, capitalism triumphant is an exploitative mess that is not likely (not certainly) to get better; thus, there remains a clear need for principles embracing collective solutions to collective problems. Still and all, pomo earned its reputation by taking apart those grand ideas that Enlightenment thinkers, including Marx, needed for traction -- concepts such as universals, reason, humanism, et. al. The core of the book are the chapters where Eagleton shows how these modernist pillars still hold together despite attacks from pomo's deconstruction wing. How successfully he does this is again up to the reader to decide. In my view, he's pretty effective, especially when showing up pomo's political sterility. At times, however, I wasn't sure whether he was arguing that such pivotal concepts as universals and essences are really real or merely indispensible. Politically, I suppose the question comes to the same thing. Anyhow, this is a worthwhile book for those who are looking for a learned Marxist reply to the postmodern challenge and are willing to put up with the vagaries of an allusive style.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An experiment against reality, August 16, 2004

By 

Pieter "Toypom" (Johannesburg) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Illusions of Postmodernism (Paperback)

In his attempt to find a working definition, Eagleton makes a distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity. For him, postmodernism is a style of culture reflecting something of the epochal changes during the historical phase of postmodernity. He explores the culture and milieu of postmodernist philosophy as a whole and does not much discuss particular works of art or specific theorists. Eagleton's approach is to look at what a student today might believe about postmodernism and to prove that most of that is false. Although his view is mainly negative, he judges both postmodernism's strengths and its failures from a broadly socialist political and theoretical perspective.

The book draws extensively on the author's writings in the London Review Of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Monthly Review, Textual Practice and Socialist Register and is divided into the chapters Beginnings, Ambivalences, Histories, Subjects, Fallacies and Contradictions. Eagleton's sense of irony and gift of satire ensure an engaging text, especially when he comes up with turns of phrase like: " ... from Lyotard to leotards ...". He also touches on subjects are disparate as Madonna, graphic novels and gothic architecture, which enliven the text.

Eagleton considers the politics of postmodernism to have been both enrichment and evasion. For all its supposed openness, Pomo can be just as censorious and exclusivist as the orthodoxies it opposes. He explains that it is a type of orthodox heterodoxy that needs its straw men in order to stay in business. In its attempt to cut the ground from under its opponents' feet, Pomo unavoidably pulls the rug from under its own. He explores pomo's hatred of essentialism (the specific "whatness" of a thing) and concludes that if enlightenment universalism is exclusivist in practice, ethnic particularism can be exclusivist in both practice and theory.

Eagleton concludes that pomo is not just some theoretical mistake. It is the ideology of a particular historical epoch in the West when reviled and humiliated groups discovered something of their history and selfhood. But its inherent failings are its cultural relativism, moral conventionalism, cynicism, localism and lack of any adequate theory of political agency. As such, he concludes that postmodernism cannot confront authoritarian ideologies.

In simple parlance, pomo thought with its relativism denies distinctions between right and wrong or good and evil, whilst claiming that everything is just a power game and we are all victims. It in fact provides a fertile breeding ground for fascism, something that Eagleton is perhaps too polite to spell out. But his thoughts have broadened my perspective on this jargon-jaded phenomenon, all thanks to his elegant prose and intellectual acuity.

The book concludes with notes and an index. I also recommend Intellectual Impostures (Fashionable Nonsense) by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, an investigation of how postmodernist theorists twist and abuse the language of the natural sciences. Further books of interest include Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson and Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks.