>Eagleton can be interesting, but he misses the point: theory does not
>think in sentences. It's the grammar, the space between the sentences,
>through which the lightning-bolt of content flashes.
i thought eagleton's review sounded a little bitter and traumatised, but that could be because i haven't read his later work, where he may well have denounced of his own work what he now finds so deplorable in spivak. maybe he has changed his mind, maybe he just prefers it when the boy theorists do it, maybe it's just a whinge that comes from the small swamp of litcrit... who knows, but it certainly isn't obvious to me why someone would cite macheray so approvingly (see below) in 1975 and decide now that, in spivak's hands, it warrants complaint.
"The distance which separates the work from ideology embodies itself in the internal distance which ... separates the work from itself. In putting ideology to work, the text necessarily illuminates the absences, and begins to 'make speak' the silences, of that ideology. ... The absences -- the 'not-said' of the work -- are precisely what binds it to its ideological problematic: ideology is present in the text in the form of its eloquent silences. The task of criticism ... is to install itself in the very incompleteness of the work in order to theorise it -- to explain the ideological necessity of those 'not-saids' which constitute the very principle of its identity." [Terry Eagleton, _Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory_ , p.89.]
Angela _________