Like clog dancing, the art of analyzing literature is almost dead on its feet.

A whole tradition of what Nietzsche called '€œslow reading'€ is in danger of sinking without trace. One of the best ways to unlock understanding about works of literature is to pay close attention to literary form and technique.

Terry Eagleton, best known as a literary theorist and political critic, in his latest book How to Read Literature, manages to provide a guide for beginners, those
already engaged in literary studies, or those who simply enjoy reading poems, plays and novels in their spare time.

This book is a sort of refresher course. It is divided into five parts: Openings, character, narrative, interpretation and value.

In his book, Eagleton admits at the outset that learning how to be a literary critic is a matter of learning how to deploy certain techniques that are more easily picked up in practice than in theory.

Eagleton keeps faith with one central tenet: The importance of exploring the slippery nature of words as deeply and carefully as possible, and explaining this to a wide audience.

While analyzing A Passage to India, he writes a seven-page analysis of the opening sentences. The lines are gradually unpacked, from their rhythm and metrical balance to the difficulty of pinning down the narrative tone. Eagleton shows readers how critical judgment requires sustained attention to the details of language.

Readers will find several noted canons in the book such as Charlotte Brontë, Forster, Keats, Milton, Hardy et al '€” plus JK Rowling. In response to the canons, Eagleton comes up with an elaborate reading of the nursery rhyme like in Baa Baa Black Sheep with the intention of showing why such an interpretation is under-justified by the text.

In particular, there is a section on interpreting the Harry Potter series that is great fun to read. As in all texts of this kind, there is an emphasis on explaining themes and styles through examples.

Applying the approach, the writer advises his audience not to read in certain ways. Through the close reading of selected passages of poetry and prose, he aims to show how to appreciate the best of what has been thought and said.

Readers will see Eagleton is a strong supporter of modernist literature. He expresses a sanguine tone dealing with works of fiction like Tristram Shandy, Heart of Darkness, Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway. Eagleton believes those pieces can serve to free us from seeing human life as goal-driven, logically unfolding and rigorously coherent.

Though this is a serious book, Eagleton is very good at exposing some funny things.

Eagleton explains how the words '€œCall me Ishmael'€ (the famous opening of Moby-Dick) are rather like saying: '€œMy real name is Algernon Digby-Stuart, but you can call me Lulu.'€

The writer succeeds in elaborating what he thinks is wrong with the prose of Updike and Faulkner, and what is good about the prose of Waugh, Nabokov'€™s Lolita and Carol Shields.

Along with close reading, understanding literary works is closely bound to historical consciousness. Eagleton, for example, stresses the great 19th-century novelists (Eliot, Dickens) saw the world in terms of articulate stories, though in the case of Dickens, there is also the wavering of the prosaic virtue of the Little Nell/Oliver variety and the blood-curdling villainy of Fagin.

He adds that the 20th-century sense of the self as an enigma brought about the splendors of Proust, Joyce, Eliot and Beckett, great literary works where nothing happens.

Despite it being full of sensitivity toward the surface of language as a route to the life of art, I am of the opinion that this book remains problematic in terms of critical analysis. Referring to literature as a text has always been one of the theorist'€™s linguistic mistakes, assuming as it does that literature is not really art but rather a hook on which an academic can hang his sociopolitical laundry.

In addition, the raising of political or theoretical questions is not the charge of the average intelligent reader who goes to novels, poems and plays for aesthetic delight, pieces of wisdom about the world and a fresh way of
seeing.

Above all, this book is helpful for those readers who are eager to engage with art and willing to wrestle with writers. Readers will find themselves better equipped to succeed by using the strategies and tools provided here.

I would recommend the book to literature students. This is about as brilliant and sensible a book about literature there is.

How to Read Literature
Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press, 2013
216 pages

From The Weekender

I wasn’t into nationalist orchestras, then Satoe Indonesia surprised me

What started as a rainy-night obligation turned into a nostalgic reminder that the songs of our childhood never really leave us.

Read on The Weekender

Popular

HSBC’s The Redefining Treasury Asia Pacific reveals shift toward real-time treasury

Plan for new Jakarta-Bandung fast train raises questions over Whoosh

Bali governor seeks to pull the plug on Airbnb