Review by Choice Review
Eagleton (English literature, Univ. of Lancaster, UK) addresses the many guises in which culture appears in discourse. A prolific literary critic with a Marxist approach, Eagleton deploys a number of strategies to examine the concept of culture. In his first chapter, he offers a brief overview of the evolution of the word culture and its distinction from civilization. In ensuing chapters, he looks at culture from the vantage point of various scholarly methodologies, for example examining it as "social unconscious" and addressing postmodernist ideas about the value of diversity and multiplicity. Eagleton references cultural figures ranging from T. S. Eliot to Karl Marx, from Madonna to Oscar Wilde. One of the book's particular strengths is Eagleton's ability to make complicated theoretical issues accessible to almost any reader. Eagleton's clear thinking is reflected in his clear prose style. That is not to say, however, that all readers will agree with his conclusions, especially because he takes issue with longstanding assumptions about the way people think about culture. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; general readers. --Joe Moffett, Kentucky State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Culture has four major meanings, prominent public intellectual Eagleton (How to Read Literature, 2013) says. Three of those artistic and intellectual work; spiritual and intellectual development; and a people's customs, values, beliefs, and symbolic practices tend to be subsumed by the fourth, an entire way of life. Keeping all four definitions in play, Eagleton discusses culture in relation to civilization; postmodern prejudices (diversity, cultural relativism); Wittgenstein's formulation of the social unconscious; Oscar Wilde's socialist aestheticism; commoditization; and social and political significance. So doing, he explores the cultural thought of major thinkers including, besides those already mentioned, T. S. Eliot, Matthew Arnold, New Left inspirer Raymond Williams, and two eighteenth-century figures important to traditionalists and revolutionaries alike, Edmund Burke and J. G. Herder. In conclusion, Eagleton projects, from the contemporary attrition of academic literary studies, the waning of the political utility of culture. The great questions confronting twenty-first-century humanity are not cultural but far more mundane and material. . . . War, hunger, drugs, arms, genocide, disease, ecological disaster. Cultural politicians would do better to remain silent. Informative, cogent, perhaps galvanizing.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Fans of esteemed literary theorist Eagleton (Why Marx Was Right) will be pleased with this analysis of culture as the sum of "values, customs, beliefs and symbolic practices." Eagleton carefully distinguishes culture from civilization, "a world which is humanly manufactured." He places particular emphasis on two 18th-century thinkers, political theorist Edmund Burke and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, for realizing culture's populist potential. His historical survey, which also touches on several later writers (Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, Raymond Williams), traces his subject from the French Revolution to the War on Terror. Eagleton argues that contemporary crises, such as "the clash between Western capitalism and radical Islam," are wrongly reduced to clashes of culture when they are geopolitical. In a diatribe against cultural studies, he accuses the discipline of not challenging class disparities, "deal[ing] in sexuality but not socialism, transgression but not revolution, difference but not justice, identity but not the culture of poverty." He bemoans modern capitalism's nefarious influence, arguing that this has led to "the global decline of the universities," in which they have become "pseudo-capitalist enterprises under the sway of a brutally philistine managerial ideology." Though these scathing critiques come across as shortsighted, they still contain Eagleton's characteristic wit. He does not make the "true" definition of culture any less elusive, but his book is nonetheless an impressive display of erudition. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
