How to Read Literature
Ratings3
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings3
Average rating3.5
"What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like Baa Baa Black Sheep be full of concealed loathing, resentment and aggression?In this accessible and delightfully entertaining book, Terry Eagleton addresses these intriguing questions and a host of others. How to Read Literature is the book of choice for students new to the study of literature and for all other readers interested in deepening their understanding and enriching their reading experience. In a series of brilliant analyses, Eagleton shows how to read with due attention to tone, rhythm, texture, syntax, allusion, ambiguity and other formal aspects of literary works. He also examines broader questions of character, plot, narrative, the creative imagination, the meaning of fictionality, and the tension between what works of literature say and what they show. Unfailingly authoritative and cheerfully opinionated, the author provides useful commentaries on Classicism, Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism alongside spellbinding insights into a huge range of authors, from Shakespeare and Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett and J.K. Rowling."--Inside dust jacket.
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I realize I'm in the minority when I think that reading a book on literary criticism (albeit an introduction) sounds like a pleasant – maybe fun – way to spend a few hours. But Terry Eagleton gave us just that kind of book for anyone who's at least a semi-serious reader (even less than serious, but I can't imagine anyone else reading this). Covering a wide-range of topics, Eagleton writes with verve and panache, producing and educational as well as entertaining volume.
Over five lengthy chapters, Eagleton looks at both micro and macro issues of criticism. The first chapter looks at opening lines, paragraphs, scenes on the micro-level: ambiguities of language, sounds, syntax, word choice, etc. After this introduction, he zooms out to the macro level spending a chapter each on Character, Narrative, Interpretation and Value. Throughout all these, he bounces from illustration to illustration over a spectrum of literature – novels, plays, poetry. Some of which he spends a long time on, some only sentences.
His reading of “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” was at once preposterous, laughable (and laugh-worthy) and entirely sound. Just getting to it was almost worth the effort of the rest of the book.
Shortly after that, in the chapter on interpretation Eagleton enters into a lengthy discussion of Great Expectations through the prisms of a variety (by no means exhaustive) of interpretive methods for approaching the text. He then moves to a quick (but not shallow) look at another orphan – Harry Potter (which includes a quick glance at Luke Skywalker). I quite enjoyed and agreed with his take on The Boy Who Lived, incidentally. Not only did that serve to compare popular British literature over the years, it served as a good transition to the concluding chapter on the value of literary works – is Harry Potter worth a critic's attention?
That chapter does a better job at raising interesting questions than actually answering any of them (which I think was his point, if not, he failed utterly). I did appreciate this bit of an answer (which led to further questions, I should note):
Enjoyment is more subjective than evaluation. Whether you prefer peaches to pears is a question of taste, which is not quite true of whether you think Dostoevsky a more accomplished novelist than John Grisham. Dostoevsky is better than Grisham in the sense that Tiger Woods is a better golfer than Lady Gaga. Anyone who understands fiction or golf well enough would be almost bound to sign up to such judgements. . . If literary judgments were objective in that sense there would be no arguing over them, and you can wrangle far into the night over whether Elizabeth Bishop is a finer poet than John Berryman. Yet reality does not divide neatly down the middle between objective and subjective. The point is that there are criteria for determining what counts as excellence in golf or fiction, as there are not for determining whether peaches taste better than pineapples. And these criteria are public, not just a question of what one happens privately to prefer. . . Knowing what counts as excellence in fiction is likely to decide the issue between Chekhov and Jackie Collins, but not between Chekhov and Turgenev.
