WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Terry Eagleton
New York: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986
114 pp., $143.95 cloth
In the context of political and ideological tumult, the role of the literary intellectual may seem obscure. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the potency of literature and the way we think about it in relation to the general movement of our culture. In totalitarian countries, it is the writer - poet, novelist, or critic - whom the authorities fear most; freedom of imagination can be more dangerous at times than mere freedom of thought. By contrast, in the West we are now witnessing a peculiar irony; as orthodox Marxism has lost its force and freshness in such disciplines as political science and history, radical and nihilistic ideologies are dominating the study of literature and turning it into the avant-garde subject in the academy.
The rise of the intellectual as an influence in the political realm has been amply explored by Julien Benda in his La Trahison des Clercs (1927), in which he excoriated his fellow intellectuals for abandoning the pursuit of knowledge for the pursuit of power. Benda might better have used the term 'ideologue,' however, to describe the type of person typically labeled as an intellectual; the scholarship of Eric Voegelin, Gerhart Niemeyer, and Russell Kirk, also has carefully outlined the structure of the gnostic, power hungry, utopian schemes that have come to be known as ideologies. Yet whether we say ideologue or intellectual, the basic definition is much the same. In The Decline of the Intellectual, Thomas Molnar writes: "[the intellectual] puts his mental ability, education, articulateness, and experience to some political or social use [and] he is not satisfied, ultimately, with interpreting the events - of economic, social, political, nature - around himself, but is trying to influence and transform them. He thus combines theory and praxis." Of course, this is hardly a recent phenomenon: it stems from the Renaissance ethos summed up by Francis Bacon in his famous phrase, "Knowledge is power." The opposite of the intellectual is the philosopher, who seeks truth for its own sake, ordering his soul according to the order of transcendent reality.
The Rise of the Literary intellectual
Compared to philosophy and political theory, literary studies are a recent development. It was only in the nineteenth century that the monopoly of classical languages and literatures was loosened by calls for courses in vernacular literary traditions. Moreover, the literary intellectual, like his political counterparts, arose primarily because democratization and the growth of the media (especially the daily newspaper) made possible the creation and swaying of public opinion. Turn of the century critics like Edmund Gosse and George Saintsbury, for example, became extremely influential in shaping literary taste in England, but they represented a belletristic rather than an ideological approach to literature. The same is true for later writers such as G.K. Chesterton and Arnold Bennett, both tempered by their exposure to the late Victorian era. But in the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of ideology and the gradual politicization of all aspects of culture produced the first true literary intellectuals. The Bloomsbury Group, with its progressive celebration of free sex and its retreat from the public realm into a private world of aesthetic cultivation, came to
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