Terry Eagleton: Criticism and Ideology

Outlines of Chap 1 by Buck Lee

Chap 2

I. Sidney--Apology for Poetry--defends ...an institution inseparable from explicit ideological values--the values of a courtly classical humanism ...

it is for this reason above all that it must be protected from the criticisms of an assertive bourgeois puritanism.   Sidney's text marks a fading moment of ideological buoyancy, an achieved synthesis of courtly and puritan elements. p. 19

II. 'neo-classical'--criticism becomes a crucial ideological instrument....in the struggle to stabilise an ideological formation which compose the hegemonic bloc. In the drive for order, proportion and propriety, the demand for socially cohesive categories of Nature and Reason, the need to reduce and systematise social life to a series of ordered practices, ...criticism as both paradigm and instrument of such a project...  In need to incorporate new classes and fractions of classes into cultural unity, to establish a consensus of social taste, construct common traditions and disseminate uniform manners, criticism becomes one fulcrum of a whole set of ideological institutions: periodicals, coffee-houses, aesthetic and social treatises, classical translations, guide-books to manners and morals.  　

the task of criticism: . . . to show the text as it cannot know itself, to manifest those conditions of its making (inscribed in its very letter) about which it is necessarily silent.  
  

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 In "Categories for a Materialist Criticism," Terry Eagleton develops a method in order to specify the constituent structure of the material practice and to examine their precise articulations. Therefore, Eagleton divides this essay into ten sections of discussions and presents six major components of Marxist theory of literature:  General Mode of Production, Literary Mode of Production, General Ideology, Authorial Ideology, Aesthetics Ideology, and text. Eagleton provides specific examples in order to explain each category and at the same time to discuss the relations between five major categories. 
  GMP, LMP, GI, AuI, AI, Text

 1. LMP constructs an "asymmetrical totality" which the dominant LMP will force others into positions of subordination and partial exclusion. 
 2. Conflictual LMPs will coexist within a particular social formation 
 Ex: Novel vs. Poetry ; Oral LMP vs Written LMP. (45-6) 
It's important to analyse the complex articulations of these various LMPs with the 'general' mode of production of a social formation.  For instance, how oral LMP can keep its traces in a written text.
3. "Every LMP is constituted by structure of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption" (47). 
 Ex: The process or modes of production; the variety of literary producers in the mode of literary production. 
4.   We are not merely concerned here with the sociological outworks of the text; we are concerned rather with how the text comes to be what it is because of the specific determinations of its mode of production.

...every literary text in some sense internalises its social relations of production--that every text intimates by its very conventions the way it is to be consumed.(p. 48)
e.g.  the dominant LMP of Victorian England--the three guineas subscription of a consumer to Mudie's circulating library. The libraries...were powerful determinants in the selection of producers, of the pace of literary production, and of the literary product itself. The multiple complicated plots, elaborate digressions and gratuitous interludes of such works were the effect of the producers ingeniously elongating their material to meet the requirements of the form.

 1. LMP is a particular substructure of GMP. 
 Q: Though material / instruments are produced by GMP, why these materials in some modes of artistic production have no a significant function within GMP? 
 2. The relations between GMP and LMP are dialectical. The function of LMP is situated as the reproduction and expansion of the GMP. 
 Ex: the growth of printing -- the increasing productions of books, and market. 
 3. The social relations of LMP are in general determined by the social relations of the GMP. 
 Ex: the relations of the fili caste to his kings; the aristocratic poet or haut-bourgeois novelist --petty-bourgeois producer (50-51). The vernacular literature in the medieval England; the social relation of borrowing or purchasing books; the establishing the libraries (51-2). 

 A. General Ideology is a dominant ideological formation. 
 B. GI is not an "ideal type of ideology in general," but the dominated ensemble of ideologies in social formation (54). 
 C. The deployment of language in a literary text is related to GI. (54-5). 
 Ex: the history of English (mutation of Old English under Norman French influence); 
 12th century cultural movement in Ireland. 
 D. "The inter-determinations of the linguistic and the political, and their effect on the constituent of an LMP and the character of its products are thus of central significance to a materialist criticism" (56) 
 E. Two incidental points between the relation of GI and LMP affect the literary text. (57-8) 

 1. Different LMP may, in term of the ideological character of their textual products, reproduce the same ideological formation. 
 2. The censorship is the involvement of direct ideological control over the literary text. (58). 

 A. AuI is the effect of the author's mode of biographical insertion into GI. (58-60). 
 B. AI is an internally complex formation.(60). 

 A. The ideology of LMP constructs the mutually reproductive relation between GI and LMP. 
 B. "The forces and relations of literary production, on the basis of their determination by the GMP, produce the
 possibility of certain distinct literary genres" (61) 

  A. The text, as an aesthetic product, is a multiply articulated structure, determined by the contemporary GI.  (62-3). 
 B. Authorial ideology may be an important determinant of both type of LMP and AI. (63). 

Work Cited 
 Eagleton, Terry. "Categories for a Materialist  Criticism." Criticism and Ideology: A Study in   Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso, 1976. 44-63. 

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