Robert Eaglestone

Literature is where ideas are investigated, lived out, explored in all their messy complexity….Literature is how we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves. And contemporary fiction matters because it is how we work out who we are now, today.

Robert Eaglestone begins this short book by roughly sketching out the characteristics of contemporary literature, and how it differs from the earlier literary periods of Modernism (1920s+) Post-Modern (60s+). Discussion then turns to genre: a bit of history on it, what it offers, its literary value, and some discussion of a few specific genres.The author also discusses how contemporary fiction deals with the present, the past and the future. What is it communicating to us?

In the conclusion, there is some discussion of literary criticism itself, which the author likens to discovering how novels think, the patterns they make, their value and role in the world…
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Despite the fact that this book is now six or seven years old, doesn’t make it out-of-date, as I may have feared. I was surprised at how many of the novels he used to illustrate his points were novels that I had read, although one does not have to have read the books to enjoy his discussion of them. I very much enjoyed the chapter on genre, it certainly broadened my ideas of the concept. But, I also very much enjoyed the discussion of how our contemporary fiction handles the past, present or future…. so many interesting tidbits to mull…

The author clearly loves his work and it shows in this little book. It’s both scholarly and accessible. A love of good quality fiction and a curious and attentive mind is all one needs to enjoy this small book of 105 small pages.… (more)

I’ve been reading a number of books about postmodernism and deconstructionism recently, but not in any particularly organized fashion. This one turned up on some recommendation list or another, got slipped into a pocket because it’s small, and read while waiting for buses.

I have to say that author Robert Eaglestone does a pretty good job of explaining what he thinks postmodernism is, but not a terribly good job of relating it to Holocaust denial. He limits his comments to a particular case – the David Irving trial (he’s careful to note that it was not actually David Irving who was on trial; he was the plaintiff in a libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt). Eaglestone complains that postmodernism has been unfairly linked to Holocaust denial, then goes into various convolutions explaining why it should not be.


The problem is that postmodernism is a continuously shifting _target and covers a wide spectrum of belief. The idea that writers of history are influenced by their beliefs, upbringing, gender, etc., is a reasonable one – I just reviewed a book about partisan activity in the American Civil War which would have been very different if the author was from Maine instead of Virginia. The extreme extension of this – by critics and practitioners of postmodern historiography alike – is that all histories are simply the personal opinions of the historians rather than objective narration of facts. If this is taken seriously, then David Irving’s “history” of the Holocaust is just a valid as anybody else’s.


Eaglestone gets out of the dilemma not by saying that there are certain historical facts that are beyond dispute regardless of who narrates them, but rather by saying that David Irving was not a historian and therefore his opinions on the Holocaust are invalid as history. There’s an explanation of why Irving is not a historian – he doesn’t follow the “rules” of the “history genre”. Eaglestone gives an example of other “genre” – the cookbook genre, that contains recipes, and the action novel genre, that contains car chases. Therefore, Irving’s history of the Holocaust is as invalid as a car chase in a cookbook because he uses things that don’t belong in the history genre – the only thing that Eaglestone can come up with is a misinterpreted document, where Irving read “haben” as “Juden” in a telephone log. Since the historical “genre” doesn’t allow misinterpreted documents, Irving isn’t a historian, and therefore his opinions are not one of the equivalued postmodernist historical opinions.


Well, right then. Doesn’t quite work for me; sounds more like “a not very extreme interpretation of some postmodernist statements about history can be interpreted to support Holocaust denial; that can’t be right, therefore postmodernists have to come up with a reason why it isn’t”; i.e., a variation on the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.… (more)

This Very Short Introduction to Contemporary Fiction is a very interesting little book!

From the first words of the introduction to the last chapter about literary criticism, I found myself constantly nodding in agreement, with only an occasional demurral in between because I wasn’t keen on some of the books he lauds:

Literature thinks.

Literature is where ideas are investigated, lived out, explored in all their messy complexity. Sometimes these ideas look quite simple: What if you fell in love with someone who seems quite unsuitable for you? What happens if there is a traitor in your spy network? Sometimes they might appear more complicated: How can I reconstruct my memory of an event I can’t recall? Perhaps, too, ‘think’ is not the right word: ‘think’ is too limiting a description of the range of what a novel can do with ideas. In any event, the way literature thinks is bound up with what it’s like to be us, to be human. Literature is how we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves. And contemporary fiction matters because it is how we work out who we are now, today.

I believe the novel is the best way of doing this. Of all the arts, the novel is the most thoughtful, the closest, the most personal. Unlike the visual arts or music or computer games, the novel uses only language. Nearly every one of us is an expert user of language and, more importantly, nearly everyone is an expert creator in language. Every day we use words to express ourselves and to tell stories, to make patterns out of our reality. We all share and thrive in language: we are much more intimate with the novel’s medium than we are with theatre or film. Unlike much poetry or painting, fiction has narrative, sometimes in complex ways. We share this with the novel too, because each of us, in the stories we tell every day, is a skilled author and weaver of narrative. We can all judge a novel by the high and demanding standards of our own use of words and stories and by our own patterns of reality. Because it takes longer to read a novel than it does to see a film or listen to a piece of music and because novels demand more time and energy, they are more immersive. This is the origin of phrases like ‘losing yourself in a book’ or ‘the book speaks to me’ as if a novel was more than just ink on a page or words on a screen. We live in novels more than any other art form, and after reading them, they stay with us (an after-reading). The novel is still the art form most deeply and directly engaged with us. (p.1-2)

Eaglestone pays homage to the variety of forms that contemporary fiction can take, and he says that because a novel might go anywhere or do anything it’s not possible for anybody to be an expert in the usual sense of the word. He also admits that anything he says is going to be out-of-date within a decade.

His chapter headings show the directions he takes:

Chapter 1: Saying everything
Chapter 2: Form, or, what’s contemporary about contemporary fiction?
Chapter 3: Genre
Chapter 4: The past
Chapter 5: The present
Chapter 6: The future
Chapter 7: Conclusion: ‘Hey everyone, look at that beautiful thing’ / ‘Yes, but…’

I enjoyed the chapter on form, where Eaglestone acknowledges that contemporary authors make more demands on readers than authors of previous eras.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/08/03/contemporary-fiction-a-very-short-introducti...… (more)

This anthology of writings about The Lord of the Rings has an agenda: to bring literary criticism of LotR more in line with the kinds of criticism done on other twentieth century literature. I don't have a problem with that agenda; LotR has languished unjustly on the edges of the canon for far too long. (I once pitched a paper on LotR for a PhD seminar in literary modernism and was met with a kind of sneering dismissal from my professor (who was, in all other matters, as far as I could see, unfailingly brilliant and just).) And I'd agree that much LotR criticism fails to engage with the theory and literary lenses that scholars turn on other literature almost as a matter of course and that a good deal of it remains too entrenched in Middle Earth, failing to see past the end of its nose and make connections to the outside (literary and scholarly) world. So an anthology of this sort really seems just the thing.

While any anthology will be a mixed bag with some pieces standing out and others trying their best not to stink up the place, Reading LotR has more than its share of essays which demonstrate why even those of us who have been trained in this literary criticism stuff will back away slowly when anyone suggests applying Foucault (or Hegel or Butler or Marx or whomever) to our favorite stories. What is it that Gandalf says? "He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom"? It would be to betray a misunderstanding of literary criticism to define it with that quote, but this kind of breaking things sure seems to define a number of the essays in this volume. Some of these writers, in their (right-thinking) desire to bring LotR criticism into the scholarly mainstream, seem to have forgotten that theory is a lens through which one ought to see a literary text differently and more clearly. Many of the essays here either entirely miss out on illuminating the text of LotR or do manage to point up something new about the text but in a way which seems utterly divorced from the theory they purported to be using to do so. This kind of thing makes me more cross than people who ought to know better poo-pooing the relevance of Tolkien and his work. They may be missing out on something important and lovely, but at least they're leaving it unbroken on the shelf for others to find intact.

Tellingly, the best essays in this collection (and there are some quite good ones here), are those which spend (a little) less time on theory and more time with the text of LotR. Give me an entire anthology of LotR criticism like that found in Part III of this volume ("Gender, sexuality and class"), and both my inner Tolkien fan and my inner PhD-level trained literary scholar will be content. Reading LotR does puzzle me, though. There will always be the odd piece of literary criticism that just doesn't hit the mark, but with so many of the essays in this book missing the balance between theory and text that makes for an illuminating piece, one has to wonder what is going on here. Perhaps scholars interested in Tolkien now sometimes try too hard to bring LotR criticism into the litcrit fold? While Robert Eaglestone's introduction to the anthology and Michael D.C. Drout's first chapter ("Towards a better Tolkien criticism") are both quite good on where Tolkien criticism has stood in the past and what makes it stand apart (not stand out) from other literary criticism, it seems that maybe we still don't understand fully why it is often so difficult to write about Tolkien in the ways we write about his contemporaries. We needed Reading The Lord of the Rings, but we needed it to do better.… (more)