Eagleton Terry. The Idea of Culture

Blackwell Publishing, 2000. — 188 p.The Idea of Culture by Terry Eagleton an important addition to the field of cultural studies. A prominent literary critic and Marxist theorist, Eagleton writes in a style that is somewhat rambling but always colorful and lively. Placing the notion of culture in historical, philosophical, and political context, Eagleton describes the emergence of today's mass culture, with its perceived threat to traditional values. To illustrate the changing meaning of culture, he notes the views of such thinkers as Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, and Matthew Arnold. He also quotes liberally from the works of his former teacher and mentor, Raymond Williams (Culture and Society, 1780-1950). Being the initial offering in Blackwell's new "Manifestos" series, this book is recommended for advanced undergraduate collections. In this brief volume, Eagleton has produced both a thoughtful analysis of cultural theories as well as a shrewd, liberal dissection of current social and political trends. This book is a magnificent reassertion of timeless cultural values and a voice of sanity amid the roar of turbo-capitalism. As always, Eagleton shows a provocative wealth of learning. He is able to see the many sides of a problem, to put it in context and suggest new ways of viewing it, a healthy corrective to the soundbite society. Most importantly, The Idea of Culture by Terry Eagleton focuses on discriminating different meanings of culture, as a way of introducing to the general reader the contemporary debates around it.‘Culture’ is said to be one of the two or three most complex words in the English language, and the term which is sometimes considered to be its opposite – nature – is commonly awarded the accolade of being the most complex of all. Yet though it is fashionable these days to see nature as a derivative of culture, culture, etymologically speaking, is a concept derived from nature. One of its original meanings is ‘husbandry’, or the tending of natural growth. The same is true of our words for law and justice, as well as of terms like ‘capital’, ‘stock’, ‘pecuniary’ and ‘sterling’. The word ‘coulter’, which is a cognate of ‘culture’, means the blade of a ploughshare. We derive our word for the finest of human activities from labour and agriculture, crops and cultivation. Francis Bacon writes of ‘the culture and manurance of minds’, in a suggestive hesitancy between dung and mental distinction. ‘Culture’ here means an activity, and it was a long time before the word came to denote an entity. Even then, it was probably not until Matthew Arnold that the word dropped such adjectives as ‘moral’ and ‘intellectual’ and came to be just ‘culture’, an abstraction in itself.ContentsVersions of Culture
Culture in Crisis
Culture Wars
Culture and Nature
Towards a Common CultureNotes
Index