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Recent developments in English Studies at
the Centre*

The English Studies Group, 1978–9

Theoretical developments
In this section we review some theoretical work which has seemed to us
important since the publication of Mapping the Field (1973). First we extend the
previous map by noting, in the work of Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton,
an English appropriation of the two problematics reviewed; that is, literature as a
part of the superstructure or as a form of production. Then in two further sections
we look at the implications of thinking literature as production, institution or
formation; and at attempts to think about ‘reading’.

Williams and Eagleton
1
In Williams’s move from his ‘Base and superstructure’ article to Marxism and
Literature questions of consciousness and determination are sophisticated by
2
way of Gramsci’s thought. Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’ is brought nearer to
Williams’s own account of dominant and subordinate cultures (both residual and
emergent), which might be oppositional or alternative. This is combined with an
analysis of determinations, though the stress on ‘the whole social process’
threatens to evacuate the concept altogether, and again with a forceful stress on
creativity—the ‘active struggle for new consciousness’. Eagleton, in Marxism
and Literary Criticism and Criticism and Ideology has inflected Brecht’s and
3
Benjamin’s thinking on literature as practice/production, through Althusser and
Macherey, to develop a highly schematic account of ‘the literary mode of
production’.
Eagleton’s almost parricidal attack on Williams in Criticism and Ideology is
interesting, not just because it presents an extreme version of the split between
what have been called ‘culturalist’ and ‘structuralist’ Marxisms but because two
4
radically different views of what constitutes critical practice are brought out. In
Marxism and Literature Williams starts by stating that it is ‘impossible to carry
through any serious cultural analysis without reaching towards a consciousness of
the concept itself: a consciousness that must be, as we shall see, historical’. 5
Most of Williams’s work has been informed by this ‘reaching towards a