On the Occasion of Terry Eagleton's Honorary Doctorate, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Abstract


 
 
 My essay–very much in the original, tentative and exploratory sense of the word–takes retrospective stock of Terry Eagleton’s (roughly speaking) early to middle-period work across its dauntingly diverse range of topics. I focus, naturally enough, on those books that have most strongly influenced my own thinking or–as so often–pointed me in new and deeply mind-changing directions. The approach is in part anecdotal as befits a recurrent crossing of paths that has kept me reading his work with a constant sense that, whatever the shifts in my own interest, his latest book or article is likely to open up some fresh and germane line of enquiry. Nobody has done more than Terry over the past fifty years to extend the possibilities of creative inter-disciplinary exchange that opened in the late 1960s and are now being closed down with ferocious zeal by a UK in government in quest of unthinking ideological compliance. In this tribute I focus chiefly on his successive approaches to the question of ideology as it figures not only in literary and cultural theory but in daily praxis and various contexts of communal experience.