It is close to three decades since, along with thousands of other Eng lit undergrads, I fell under the spell of Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory, the primer that navigated readers through the new and forbidding territories of modern Continental thought. With irrepressible wit and narrative drive, it sliced through the conceptual thickets of phenomenology and deconstruction with the ease and force of the keenest machete.
However, in clearing a path through obscurity, a machete is liable to take nuance and ambiguity along with it. Eagleton’s appeal as a guide lay in the exhilarating speed with which he hastened us, clad in the protective gear of brisk Marxist critique, through jungles of texts and concepts. We may not have read Heidegger, Greimas or de Man by the time we got out the other side, but we sure knew what we thought of them.
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