I found Eagleton more user friendly than most writers but the Jackson book I thought has the best background of how schools of literary criticism developed.

Have a good weekend too :)

Yes Bourdieu is the cultural capital guy and very readable, at least in my opinion. I know what you mean about not knowing where to start with Marx. I read this really good book about Marx and literary criticism but can’t remember the title–it gave a very good overview of his philosophy and was comprehensible and entertaining. I’ll be at the university the week after next and see if I can find it.

Yes, it was a total shock in English and it must have been worse in Cultural Studies. A total Procrustean bed!

Yes, Marx was and still is a baddie in the US and I never learned anything about him back then. One of the reasons Obama had so much trouble with the health care plan was because the Republicans could scream ‘socialism’ and everyone would freak out. I’ll admit that my understanding of Marx’s economic theories are superficial, but I think he fairly successfully described the problems with capitalism that we are living with today. Plus he and Bordieu totally explain the way arts and culture work in modern capitalist systems.

Have a good weekend!

Hehe … yeh, what a shock, huh? To arrive in an English department like you did, or a Philosophy/Cultural Studies department like I did in 2000, and discover postmodernism. So agree re the smallness under that Big Tent. Is Bourdieu the “habitus”, “cultural capital” guy? If so, I read a bit, but Marx I’m sorry to say is so big and significant I’ve never known how to start. For this reason I call myself a “proto-Marxist.”

I’m guessing Marx belongs to your pre-postmodern academic period? And that your openly-expressed admiration for Marx belongs to your post-US period? Cos I don’t even live there but I get Kunkel’s not completely joking when he says “The US remains a society in which Marxism can be advocated only a little more respectably than pederasty.” :)

When I left business and went to uni to study English I found myself transported into a postmodern world. Having spent most of my life in the ‘real’ world, I had some real issued with postmodern theory, and especially its French advocates and had some amusing battles with lecturers. It’s interesting to observe the contradiction of how the Big Tent of postmodernism requires a virtually tribal protection of one’s beliefs to the exclusion of others (in an I’m right, you’re wrong sense).

In a world of Postmodern academics, I called myself a “Post capitalist neo-Marxist” which nicely captured both my life situation and my ideology. Seriously, Marx and Bourdieu are all you need.

Great post!