What is Terry Eagleton's main argument in the "Introduction: What Is Literature?" section of Literary Theory: An Introduction?

Eagleton is a socialist critic, and in this groundbreaking book, he argues that all literary theory is ultimately political. Like Barthes and other socialists, he grounds reality in lived history. For Eagleton, there is no ethereal space of "pure" criticism that is "universal," floating above and transcending the historical. He argues that those like the New Critics of Cambridge University in the 1920s and 1930s, who tried to examine literature as a "science" of plots, themes, symbol, ambiguity, and other literary analyses divorced from the historical and political, were themselves political.

In contrast to the New Critics and the formalists, who tried to float literature in a space "above" the historical, Eagleton's introduction firmly ties literature as an academic discipline to particular historical changes. Most specifically, he links the growth of the field to the rise of the working class and night-school universities that arose in England in the late nineteenth century to educate the laboring classes. Since this group did not know Latin and Greek, the traditional Oxford-style university core curriculum was not possible to implement. English literature became a substitute for the classics.

Eagleton, in his introduction, argues that how literary criticism contextualizes literature is ideological: literary theory most often fits literature into a framework that reinforces the power of the elite groups that control society. By positing that literature expresses "universal" and "unchanging" values, for example, critics promote the ruling-class ideology that the way things are now is the way they always have been and always will be, which works against social change. In this book, Eagleton will argue for other ways of understanding literature.

Eagleton's "Introduction" addresses the question made necessary by the study of literary theory, which is a system or systems for critically understanding literature. Eagleton wants to explain the answer to the question "What is literature?" Let's look at how he answers this question and at what his conclusion is.

To answer "What is literature?" Eagleton examines several different ways of defining literature and points out the difficulties with each of them. He says that Russian formalists reduce everything in a work of literature to the formal, that is structural, parts of the text and equally disregard author and message. He mentions that Formalist Osip Brick once said, in defence of disregarding the author when analyzing literature, that if Pushkin had not lived, Eugene Onegin--which is the textual expression of a material reality--would have been written anyway because it was a textual expression of a present material reality.

Eagleton points out the difficulty with this definition of literature by explaining that a past author, such as Orwell, would be surprised that the subjects and themes they wrote about were not important, but rather the literary devices that upturn reality through "defamiliarization" and other devices, which give a work "literariness," are what is important. 

He also presents the definition that literature is that which is chosen as "fine writing" based on social value-judgements. He discusses how, according to Marxist theory, these value-judgements arise from the ideologies that form the superstructure that create and uphold the power structures in society. The difficulty he points out here is that society is not homogeneous, thus an expected social value-judgement may not be forthcoming when a work is presented as being representative of the social ideology thus leading the work (and author) to be rejected.

With these and many more discussions and examples of proffered answers to what literature is, Eagleton arrives at his definition and at what he wants to explain. In brief, Eagleton concludes that:

• (1) literature is not objectively determined: that which is called literary may not remain immutably, unchangeably categorized as literature.

• (2) literature is not a construct of "whimsical" choice on arbitrary principles of "taste."

• (3) literature presents linguistic expressions of social and personal representations of beliefs within non-homogeneous social ideologies which holds "literary language as a set of deviations from a [conversational] norm."

• (4) literature is derived from strong undercurrents of social ideologies representing strongly rooted (often invisible) belief systems.

• (5) literature supports the "assumptions" of the social ideologies by which select groups "exercise and maintain power" over the social construct

Eagleton ends by suggesting that his assertions can be proven and chooses the history of English literature as a starting place for that proof (Chapter 1: "The Rise of English").

[S]ocial ideologies ... refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others. If this seems a far-fetched assertion, a matter of private prejudice, we may test it out by an account of the rise of 'literature' in England.

Can you critique the 'Introduction: "What is Literature"' in Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction?

In 'Introduction: "What Is Literature?"' Eagleton discusses the definitions of literature offered by various perspectives and synthesizes their various arguments to derive a definition of what literature is that satisfies his particular understanding of literature. Three focal points of his discussion are the definitions expressed by the critical theories of Formalism and Marxism and a combined Reader Response and Culturalism.

Reader Response and Culturalism put the reader and the cultural experience first in the definition of literature. In these critical approaches, what defines literature are the reader's interaction with the text and the cultural interaction with the text. Eagleton points out that while these theories validate the idea that literature is not an immutable, not an unchangeable, classification of a work or a cannon of works, the theories cannot conversely invalidate the idea that literature may not be selected by whim based upon personal taste.

Marxist theory defines literature as part of the superstructure, comprising the economic and ideological base of a society, that creates and maintains the power structure that is sustained by literature, art, religion and philosophy. Ideologies, Eagleton points out, are deeply ingrained in social belief about what society is. Therefore, literature sustains the ideology. Writing that does not sustain the ideology of society is rejected, along with the author, and not recognized as contributing to the cannon. Eagleton points out that societies are not homogeneous, are not all uniformly structured with the same ideologies, thus not all sub-sets of society or societies as a whole will accept the same writings as literature because some will violate various foundational and deeply rooted ideological superstructures.

Formalism theory starts to define literature by separating text from the author and from society. This leaves only the text and the structure, the form, of the text from which to derive a definition for literature. Formalists posit that literature makes reality more real through defamiliarization and internal literariness, both of which are embedded in the formal structure through various literary devices. Eagleton points out that authors who wrote would be surprised that their intention and their subjects are irrelevant to the study of their work.

Eagleton's conclusion of this discussion is that though literature is not immutably fixed and while author intention and message remain significant to literature regardless of equal importance of formal issues, the ideological foundations of societies and sub-sets of societies will reject or accept texts based on intention and meaning and based on how texts sustain and support the ideologies that create and support the accepted power structure. Eagleton posits that because, by his definition of literature, literature is writing that uses language in ways that "violently" diverge from the common usage of language in ordinary conversation, meaning represents the accepted appearance of reality. Since the accepted appearance of reality represents the economic base and ideological superstructure that comprises the ruling power structure, texts are literary because the fine, though violently divergent, language supports and maintains the governing power structure.