Page 50 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 41

Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

business as usual of the interpretation of the literary-critical canon.
By contrast, the analytical logic of cultural materialism points
towards a necessary decentring of texts into the contexts of their
production, reproduction and consumption, of Literature into
culture, of literary studies into cultural studies. If Williams’
politico-theoretical rhetoric was a great deal less ‘revolutionary’
than Althusser’s, the substantive case at issue was much more so.
Certainly, this was to prove Eagleton’s own eventual assessment.

Back to the future
By the end of the 1970s, Eagleton had turned to the materialist
aesthetics of Walter Benjamin and begun his long march back to
Williams. Walter Benjamin and The Rape of Clarissa, published in
1981 and 1982 respectively, represent the moments in his work
where a repudiation of Althusserianism coincides with a horri-
fied fascination for post-structuralism and a developing respect
for cultural materialism. Though this combination of repudiation,
fascination and respect was actually announced in Walter
Benjamin, it is much more properly constitutive of the argument
in The Rape of Clarissa, where a kind of feminist deconstruction
goes hand in hand with what Eagleton terms ‘historical materi-
alism’, but is actually cultural materialist in its stress on ‘literary
modes of production’ (Eagleton, 1982, p. viii). Following
Habermas (Habermas, 1989), Eagleton proposed to understand
this eighteenth-century mode of literary production as formed
within the context of the new bourgeois ‘public sphere’ (Eagleton,
1982, pp. 6–7). The Rape of Clarissa thus inaugurated an ‘institu-
tional’ analysis of the social functions of literature and criticism;
this provided the central organising theme for Eagleton’s most
fully cultural materialist books to date, Literary Theory and The
Function of Criticism.
The first of these was, of course, a textbook, though the
apparent conventionality of its form is belied by the subversive
intent of its argument. Its critical and often hostile accounts of
various contemporary schools of literary theory are predicated
on an institutional history of the development of English studies
as a discipline, which itself culminates in the polemical call for

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