'What are your views on the current state of academia? You’ve seen it evolve over a number of years.'
'Most people I know in academia want to get out. Which is a pretty new situation. I’ve never encountered that before. When I arrived in Oxbridge at the tender age of 18, it was massively upper class and very patrician, and I had a very hard time there. As a tutor in Oxford over the years, I saw all that—superficially at least—modulate. You know, Etonians with bones through their noses and Wykehamists carefully dropping their vowels, distressing their jeans and their accents. But at least in those years, the neo-managerial ethos hadn’t exerted its clammy grip so much over universities. [Neo-managerialism] is absolutely hideous. I mean, it has effectively brought to an end hundreds of years—at least a 200-year-old tradition—of the university as a centre of critique in a society where critique otherwise is pretty hard to come by. That is a momentous and historic development, and I’m really rather glad, personally speaking, that it coincides with my exit. Everywhere I go, from Peru to Australia, people are very unhappy in what perhaps were once, you know, “the best days of one’s life”.'
'How do you feel about current literary criticism? You were an episode in the history of literary criticism yourself in a sort of transition phase from Leavisism to the present day…'
'I’ve got a book coming out called something banal like How To Study Literature, because I fear that literary criticism, at least as I knew it and was taught it, is almost as dead on its feet as clog dancing. That is to say, all of the things that I would have been taught at Cambridge—close analysis of language, responsiveness to literary form, a sense of moral seriousness—all of which could have negative corollaries…I just don’t see that any more. Somewhere along the line that sensitivity to language which I value enormously got lost. I didn’t really know about this because I had moved up in the echelons of academia and I wasn’t close enough to the undergraduate ground, as it were, to be aware of this. But when I got to Manchester [Eagleton began teaching at the University of Manchester in 2001], I was appalled by the way that people could be very smart about the context of a poem, but had no idea about how to talk about it as a poem. Whereas even if one did that badly or indifferently, it was still something one automatically did in my day. This book coming out next year is really an attempt to put literary criticism as I see it back on the agenda. And to talk about questions of things like value, what’s good, what’s bad, form, theme, language, imagery, and so on.'
Terry Eagleton
