AFTER THEORY

Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and the like are no longer the exciting subjects they once were. Instead, sex is the instigator. Soft-spoken, middle-class students crowd libraries or clog web traffic to research sensationalist topics like vampirism, child pornography, cloning, and cable TV dramas. The boundaries between low and high culture are no longer guarded, and barriers have been dismantled. The golden age of cultural theory is long gone. In *After Theory*, Terry Eagleton—considered one of today's greatest left-wing intellectuals—offers a frank assessment of the losses and gains of cultural theory, countering many of the common criticisms against it but also claiming that it was evasive or ineffective on several vital issues. Tracing its rise and fall from the 1960s to the 1990s, the author explores the cultural and political factors that produced it. Eagleton revisits the pioneering works of Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and Foucault. The groundbreaking early writings of Kristeva, Derrida, and Jameson. How they brought previously unaddressed issues of gender, power, sexuality, and ethnicity to the center of debate. Some of them were overturned. Fate pushed Roland Barthes under a pickup truck and afflicted Michel Foucault with AIDS. It sent Lacan packing. But many of his ideas remain of incomparable value. AFTER THEORY shows how the generations that followed these groundbreaking figures developed these concepts, expanding on them, criticizing them, and applying them. But they arrived without a comparable body of ideas of their own. With his characteristic humor and verve, Eagleton analyzes the harmonious continuity created between the intellect and everyday life. Today, it is possible to study anything around you, but then the question arises: what kind of new thinking does the urgent and calamitous global situation demand? The answer, in the face of the new narrative of capitalism, seems to suggest the death of postmodernism.