I Happen to Have Professor Eagleton Right Behind Pip

     In his 1975 film Annie Hall, Woody Allen's character overhears, in a movie lineup, an academic misconstruing Canadian media analyst Marshall McLuhan's theories.  His partner Annie, played by Diane Keaton, watches Allen grow more irritated until he tells the aca-windbag that he misunderstands McLuhan.  The academic retorts that he is a New York University professor, and implies that he knows McLuhan better than Allen does.  Allen says that he happens to have McLuhan nearby,  and fetches McLuhan from beside a nearby cigarette machine.  McLuhan agrees with Allen, tells the professor that he misconstrues McLuhan's media theories, and laments that the academic ever got a job teaching in a university.  Allen triumphantly turns to the camera and wishes that real life was more like this scene.

     The scene could have included fellow Canadian media analyst Harold Innis, a generation earlier than McLuhan, berating McLuhan for misconstruing Innis's theories.  Italian media analyst Antonio Gramsci, a generation earlier than Innis, could have berated them both.  This regression could continue, no doubt; but  I instead move forward in time, and wish for Terry Eagleton to humble Nick Mount. 

     Lancaster and Notre Dame Universities' English Professor Terry Eagleton (b. 1943, Ireland), a renown Marxist scholar, in his 2013 How to Read Literature, argues that scholars must understand plot, character, narrative, interpretation, and literary devices before they can adopt any theoretical stance, Marxist or otherwise.  He laments the neglect of textual analytical skills, historical context, reader context, and literary ranking in this era of post-modernist disregard, misunderstanding, and ignorance of literary analytical techniques.  In his preface, Eagleton says he remains a Marxist.

     University of Toronto English Professor and Walrus Fiction Editor Nick Mount, in "The uses and abuses of literature" (The Globe and Mail, May 25, 2013) argues that the book proves that Eagleton has renounced his Marxism.  Perhaps the good professor did not read the preface, although he  seems to have misread the book in general.

     Woody Allen makes films.  I write about books I read.  Some of what I wrote about this book follows.

     The book's "chapters are Openings, Character, Narrative, Interpretation, and Value, each spiced with rhetorical and whimsical flourishes, but also solid arguments.  Openings refutes post-modernism, a wayward path away from literary precision, respect, and context.  This easy task continues through subsequent chapters, which add Aristotelian categories, not immune from flaws themselves, given the historical context Eagleton stresses."

     "Form matters, dictates narrative, interpretation, and thus authorial intention, itself open to overthrow, given readers' different eras and values.  From Sophocles to Johnson, literature detailed the known; but Romanticism lauded the invented, and its legacy continues.  Still, literary device, density, diction, and themes common to many, death, life, love, and such, lend literature value.  Great Expectations and Carol Shields trump contrived Updike and inelegant Faulkner, for example."

     "Hypocrite attacks idealist for not recanting as he did," I conclude, wishing that I could pull Eagleton from behind Pip to berate Mount.  "How you ever got a job teaching at the University of Toronto is beyond me," I dream of Eagleton saying.  "Eagleton's Marxist analysis of me captures the rigid English class system which buffets me in Great Expectations," I dream of Pip saying.  The novel's author, Charles Dickens, would probably side with Eagleton against Mount. 

     To paraphrase Woody Allen, "Don't you wish life could be like this?"

     Instead, I ponder Alexander Pope, and dream of capping a Dunce who poses as an informed critic.  We endure Professor Nick Mount-ing the academic heights, and blowing his windy authority toward that trust fund baby The Walrus, an imitation literary magazine.  A book of Dickens in one hand, a book of Eagleton in another, Old Nick draws his rusty literary dagger.  He juggles sense and nonsense, carving texts to fit his polemical Procrustean bed.  The jester entertains students whose privileged backgrounds insulate them from understanding either the human condition or its literary reflections, and somnolent magazine readers who mistake childish contrivance for literary maturity.  Stop opening your mouth in newspapers and letting your brains fall out, Nicky.  Go back to barking in your fluffy sinecure, St.Nick, and leave the job of literary critic to the big dogs.