A so-called ‘critical revolution’

Terry Eagleton appraises the theorists

Benjamin Madden

Critical Revolutionaries: Five critics who changed the way we read

by Terry Eagleton Yale University Press

US$20 hb, 288 pp

For generations of English literature graduates in the Anglophone world, Terry Eagleton’s name has become synonymous with literary theory, not because he has been its leading practitioner or fiercest advocate, but because he published Literary Theory: An introduction in 1983. This widely assigned primer conceals a deep ambivalence behind its innocuous title: in his conclusion, Eagleton announces that the book has been ‘less an introduction than an obituary’, in the sense that ‘literary theory’, like literature itself, only pretends to name a bounded field of enquiry. Nonetheless, the enterprise of theory rumbled on largely untroubled for two decades (who knows how many of the undergraduates assigned the book made it to the conclusion), and so After Theory (2003) was much less demure: ‘The golden age of cultural theory is long past,’ Eagleton announces on page one. In the preface to the same work he remarks, with disarming bluntness, that theory’s contemporary orthodoxy fails to ‘address itself to questions searching enough to meet the demands of our political situation’.

What those questions might entail is demonstrated in the stream of volumes Eagleton has produced since, mainly directed at an extramural readership, with titles including Humour, Tragedy, Radical Sacrifice, The Meaning of Life, and Why Marx was Right. Taken together, they comprise a decent (if allusive) picture of Eagleton’s sensibility. Critical Revolutionaries: Five critics who changed the way we read is the latest addition to this corpus, and the context of its author’s larger project matters in at least two ways. First, its intended audience might help to explain the slightly unctuous ‘we’ in the book’s subtitle: few literary critics today would acknowledge a methodological debt to F.R. Leavis. Second, the five essays that make up Critical Revolutionaries amount to a survey of the modality (‘movement’ would be a more natural-sounding term, but implies too much unanimity of purpose) within literary studies that theory is often thought to have displaced, and one which, Eagleton notes, ‘helped to form’ him.

These five essays sketch a history of the so-called ‘critical revolution’, which took place at Cambridge during the 1920s and after, and is largely responsible for the institutionalisation of literary studies within academic life, as we have come to know it. They follow a roughly chronological succession moving from T.S. Eliot to the slightly younger I.A. Richards, to the contemporaries (and open foes) William Empson and Leavis, to Raymond

Williams, whom Eagleton describes as his ‘teacher, friend and political comrade’.

Literary texts had, of course, been studied in universities for some time, either under the guise of philology, or as a species of belletristic delectation carried out by gentleman amateurs. Opposed to scholarly myopia on the one side and amiable triviality on the other, the essence of the critical revolution was the view that language and life are completely imbricated, and that therefore ‘the close reading of literary texts was a profoundly moral activity which cut to the heart of modern civilisation’. Eagleton quotes the Cambridge éminence grise of those years, Ludwig Wittgenstein, to that effect: ‘To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.’

The methodologically rigorous and morally serious study of literature was a way to ‘take the moral temperature’ of our society. Infused with missionary zeal, Richards pursued this procedure through his teaching and in works like Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929). But it was Eliot from whom Richards drew many of his critical bearings (and who returned the favour through several admiring references to Richards in his own critical essays), and so it is with Eliot that Eagleton’s récit begins. Eliot’s doctrine of impersonality, his concept of the dissociation of sensibility, the objective correlative, and, above all, tradition resonate throughout Critical Revolutionaries; they establish a paradigm for criticism that remains visible, albeit much modified, even in Williams and his structures of feeling.

In his Culture and Society, 1780–1950, Williams places Eliot among a cast of reactionary thinkers who read culture symptomatically. In his retrospective thoughts on that work, Williams comments that his subjects had ‘put the right questions but gave the wrong answers’, a surprisingly equanimous judgement given the radical he had become. But it is a stance shared by Eagleton himself. So we hear about some of Eliot’s less familiar political commitments, as well as the more notorious ones. Eliot’s conservatism sets him against (in his own words) ‘the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism’. His sense of place might resonate in our own time, Eagleton avers, ‘as a rebuke to global capitalism’. For all their political differences, Eliot and Williams share a view that capitalism tends to impede human flourishing.

The conservative Eliot, the liberals Richards, Empson, and Leavis, and the Marxist Williams: this is the political matrix against which several of the recurrent themes in Critical Revolutionaries appear. Normativity is one: for each of these critics, literary form and language are expressions (sometimes as a negative image) of a society’s deep mores and commitments. Moreover, the literary text makes those commitments available to reason about and argue with; this, not the disinterested collection and display of socio-historical specimens, is the purpose of criticism. Criticism’s intersubjectivity is another, related theme: if criticism is not a scientifically objective enterprise (perhaps to Richards’s mild disappointment), nor is it just a matter of expressing personal feelings. The form of a critical judgement, according to Leavis, is ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ Neither agnostic nor dogmatic (although at times Leavis could certainly be this), criticism is an invitation to conversation.

Eagleton has a capacious definition of literary theory as any systematic reflection on what it is that literary critics and scholars do; by this account, all the critics treated in Critical Revolutionaries are theorists. But ‘theory’, as the term is often used in the academic context, picks out a specific intellectual constellation that began to emerge in the 1960s, often (but not exclusively) inspired by French intellectuals. Whereas theory tries to ground the practice of scholars and critics in methods and paradigms derived from linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and so on, Eagleton’s critical revolutionaries held (notwithstanding many fascinating interdisciplinary peregrinations) that criticism’s proper footing is to be found on ‘the rough ground of everyday life’.

There is a recent intervention by a younger scholar lurking somewhere behind this book: Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A concise political history. There, North describes the theory wars as largely a distraction from the more fundamental tussle between scholars and critics, that is ‘between those who treated the study

Architecture

Foundations and landmarks

An ambitious look at Australian architecture

Philip Goad

Australian Architecture: A history

by Davina Jackson

Allen & Unwin

$30.95 pb, 368 pp of literature as a means by which to analyse culture and those who treated … [it] as an opportunity to intervene in culture’.

It is more than fifty years since anyone attempted to comprehensively describe the history of Australian architecture.

In 1968, Sydney academic J.M. Freeland’s Architecture in Australia: A History was a landmark publication. The timing of its release was intended to celebrate 180 years of building on the continent since formal European invasion, marked by the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. As with any ambitious documentary exercise, Freeland’s book was greeted with a mixture of admiration and scorn.

The same might be reserved for Davina Jackson’s new book, Australian Architecture: A history, which bravely sets out to map an even greater time range. It tries to make sense of today’s architectural scene and to fill in some of the gaps that she has identified along the way. To a large degree, Jackson succeeds. That this book was written during the first two years of Covid-19, when access to archives and libraries was severely limited, is no mean feat. Australian Architecture is thus to be welcomed and the author congratulated. Its publication will invite public interest with its easy and approachable writing style and the attractive selection of archival images and colour photographs. At the same time, it will stir, even annoy, historians and scholars with some of its claims and frustrate with the lack of a clear narrative framing.

North’s analysis reminds us that Critical Revolutionaries is an Anglocentric book and that the critical revolution’s turn to the right took place mainly in America courtesy of the New Critics; this helps to account for the lingering aversion it can evoke in literary academia. But the institutional purchase that the critical revolution won for literary studies is now subject to unprecedented threat. Therefore, it is hard not to hear in Critical Revolutionaries a call for an academic criticism no longer bound to either philological quietism or French-derived meta-discourses, but situated once again on the rough ground, addressing (and arguing with) what remains of the extramural reading public. g

The book is structured into ten chapters arranged chronologically, each covering a span of twenty to thirty years, with the exception being the first, which covers – startlingly – pre-contact history to 1799. The inclusion of Indigenous architecture in that first chapter is welcome. Freeland had nothing on the topic and Jackson’s acknowledgment of Paul Memmott’s important book, Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal architecture of Australia (2007) is apposite. But five and a half pages devoted to Indigenous architecture in a chapter of twenty-three pages is not enough. Later in the volume, Jackson rightly mentions contemporary Indigenous architects such as Dillon Kombumerri and Kevin O’Brien, and her section titled ‘Architectures of Conciliation’ is one of the best in the book. But throughout the volume there is nothing on Australia’s shameful treatment of its Indigenous peoples, as illustrated through the story of mission architecture, which persisted well into the 1950s and was found across the entire continent. Nor is there discussion of the government’s failed attempts in the 1960s and 1970s to deal with Indigenous housing issues or even the appearance in Canberra of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972. To be fair, Jackson does make occasional mention of moments when Indigenous peoples were moved on from urban sites to make way for major public buildings such as Victoria’s Parliament House (1855–91) in Melbourne. But the opportunity to embed Indigenous presence across the entire ‘history’ and to bring the story of Australian architecture into line with other recent survey histories of Australia is one not taken.

Instead, Jackson gives a lively and inclusive account of building types and architectural styles over two and a half centuries, and to a large degree she succeeds in this aim. Important inclusions are Jackson’s notes on the active role played in the country’s nineteenth-century settlements by theatres as places of popular entertainment. She also highlights a significant series of flatroofed Sydney houses that might be understood as precursors of the modern. On the other hand, this exhaustive focus on building types means that coherent historical narratives are hard to trace throughout the book. The problem is that in attempting to be comprehensive there are countless paragraphs that read as lists of buildings (many undated), particularly in the last few chapters. As a result, there are moments when the book reads not as a history but as a gazetteer.

There is also the curious inclusion of special inserts on buildings and places that one might visit, such as Perth Town Hall or the Bowali Visitor Centre in Kakadu National Park. This is minor, in totality their sheer number undermines an argument for the book’s definitiveness. not necessarily a bad thing, but the choice is random and the motivation unclear. After all, this is not and does not set out to be a guidebook. There are also double-page inserts on styles and influences, where Jackson resorts to made-up terms like ‘Neo-Moderne’, ‘Blobitecture’, and ‘Datatecture’, which are not helpful to the architecturally uninitiated and, for the informed reader, come across as fast and loose journalese. Further, she uses international examples to illustrate terms such as ‘Minimalism’ and ‘Postmodernism’. Why not use Australian examples?

Elsewhere in the text, in describing buildings such as Sydney Town Hall as ‘wedding cake architecture’, Jackson falls into the trap of easy negative tropes that have long denigrated the socalled Boom Style architecture of the 1880s. Jackson also uses her own made-up terms like ‘Matchstick Mannerism’, which, in certain circles, makes light of the seriousness and diversity of late twentieth-century design practice. There are also multiple errors of fact and omissions. For example, Australia’s architect-representative for the United Nations Headquarters in New York was not ‘Guy Sollieux’ but Giles A. Soilleux. Image captions omit Marion Mahony Griffin from the design of Newman College and Evan Walker from the Canberra School of Music. These are just three examples, but they point to a book that could have waited another year for a thorough checking. While they might seem

Perhaps the greatest problem with Jackson’s book is its lack of spatiality. There is little sense of buildings and structures being erected across a continent of extraordinary scale and diversity of landscapes, or of the distinctive architectural cultures concentrated in its disparate capital cities. For the international reader, there is no map of the entire country, no plans (apart from Colonel William Light’s plan for Adelaide) of any Victorian era city or regional town, or any subdivision patterns that help to describe the emergence of the narrow-fronted terrace house (which garners no discussion anyway). There is little mention of suburban vernacular traditions or buildings associated with agriculture such as shearing sheds, or mining and its related infrastructures and townships – activities that defined a nation and, in large part, distinguished aspects of Australian architecture from the rest of the world until around 1960. Insufficient attention is paid to twentieth-century government efforts in the provision of social housing in urban, suburban, and regional settings. Nor is there a sense of Australia operating as one element in an expanded spatial/global network of empire in the nineteenth century. Here, for example, reference to Alex Bremner’s book, Imperial Gothic: Religious architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, 1840–1870 (2013), and Jaynie Anderson and her fellow authors’ recent monographs on Archbishop Goold and architect William Wardell’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, would have illuminated any discussion of the hundreds of churches built across the country in the nineteenth century.

Despite its failings, Jackson’s book – like Freeland’s – will have some impact. Its breadth of ambition is commendable, but it will serve, as Freeland’s did, to prompt current and future generations of historians and writers on architecture to frame more precisely and more responsibly any survey accounts of Australian architecture. Significantly, it will prompt serious scholarly attention on accurately describing styles, theoretical ideas, and the groupings of architects and buildings, especially those of the past forty years. Perhaps most important of all, it will inspire others to contextualise Australian architecture as geographically, climatically, politically, spatially and materially placed, with design traditions that have deep as well as contemporary histories. It will usher forth architectural histories that address the inherent tension between settler colonialism and Indigenous understandings of shelter on Country and question the role of architectural production and environment from a longitudinal and contemporary standpoint. In short, it will prompt a better form of story. g