Page 48 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

ranging from Dollimore’s own view that his work derives from
‘the considerable output of Williams himself’ (Dollimore &
Sinfield, 1994, p. 2) to Gorak’s observation that writers like
Dollimore ‘have reduced Williams’s program to little more than
a slogan’ (Gorak, 1988, p. 90). While Dollimore and Sinfield clearly
subscribe to a much looser sense of the term than Williams uses,
their insistence on their own indebtedness suggests something
at least of the continuing relevance of his work.

Terry Eagleton
The most significant contemporary figure in the cultural mat-
erialist line, however, is surely Terry Eagleton, Professor of
Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester. Though
Eagleton clearly occupies a less representative position in
relation to literary studies than does, say, Stuart Hall in relation
to cultural studies, the trajectory of his intellectual career never-
theless nicely traces the varying impact on literary studies of
Williams’ work. Eagleton’s early work was written very much in
the shadow of Culture and Society (Eagleton, 1968) and as late as
1975, his book-length study of the Brontës managed to combine
a continuing debt to Williams with an emergent sympathy for
Althusser’s structural Marxism (Eagleton, 1975). Only a year later,
however, would come Criticism and Ideology, and with it, not only
a fairly full-fledged ‘Althusserianism’, but also a pointedly trench-
ant critique of Williams. Eagleton’s Althusserianism consisted of
two things: a highly formalist elaboration of ‘the major
constituents of a Marxist theory of literature’, which centred
around the twin concepts of ‘mode of production’ and ‘ideology’;
and the proposal for a structuralist ‘science of the text’, concerned
with how literature ‘produces’, in the sense of ‘performs’,
ideology (Eagleton, 1976).
The critique of Williams found his work guilty of an ‘idealist
epistemology, organicist aesthetics and corporatist sociology’, all
three of which have their roots in ‘Romantic populism’ (p. 27).
The defining characteristic of that Romanticism, as of the very
notion of ‘culture’ itself, was, for Eagleton, a radical ‘over-
subjectivising’ of the social formation by which structure is

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