Terry Eagleton's 'Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism'

Introduction

Eagelton’s essay, Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism, was first published in the New Left Review in 1983 in which his post Marxist analysis of literature is exposed. He accounts for capitalism influence on art and its role. The capitalist and late capitalist areas have seen two new forms of literature appear: modern and postmodern. The modern, Eagleton explains, 

“In bracketing off the real social world, establish[es] a critical, negating distance between itself and the ruling social order”

while postmodern works accepts the fact that it is a commodity and thus conflicts between its material reality and its aesthetic structure. Capitalism has turned art into a commodity, and after analysing this claim, the characteristics of modern and postmodern genres will be analysed, so as to understand literature’s role. 

Capitalism

• Definition 

Capitalism is about an economical and political system in which a country's trade and industries are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. Capitalism includes private property, wage labour, voluntary exchange, a price system, and competitive markets. 

• Characteristics  

1. Rich become more rich, and poor become poorer. 
2. Zero role from the side of government to control the people of the society. 
3. Private ownership is ready to bring disaster in the society. 
4. Competition between the business class people which will ruin the daily 
5. wages for the labour class people.  

There are some positive effects of Capitalism. They are: 

1. Only consumers get benefit during capitalist movement. 
2. Efficiency will grow.  

• Effects on Literature

Art and literature have been influenced by some characteristics of late capitalism, such as virtual reality based on mass consumerism. Our society focuses on commodities sold to and ideologically integrated by the consumer:

“The commodity is less an image in the sense of a “reflection” than an image of itself, its entire material being devoted to its own self-presentation”.

Art has become centred on its own image, role and place within society, because it has somehow lost its utopian role of mirroring the world, as if capitalism has perverted its function: 

“If the unreality of the artistic image mirrors the unreality of its society as a whole, then it is to say that it mirrors nothing real and so does not really mirror at all.” 

 Modernism

• Characteristics

1. All traditions were vanished during the modern era.  
2. Technologicaland scientific invasions became more advanced during modern era. 
3. People became ready to adopt the new culture and start avoiding the actual culture.
4. Individualism emerged on a wide platform. 
5. Modernism emerged as an international movement. 
6. All traditions were vanished and people start thinking about the future orientation by killing the deep roots of past.

• Major Themes 

1. Doubt and quarry first time raised in the field of literature during modern era. 
2. Personal issues and psychological condition of the society used to reflect in modern literature.
3. Unbelievable imaginations flourished during modern era. 
4. First time in the history of mankind, human beings started questioning the existence of God. 

• Effects on Literature

Eagleton uses de Man’s deconstructivist theory to define modernism:

"Literature defines and pre-empts its own cultural institutionalisation by textually introjecting it, hugging the very chains which bind it, discovering its own negative form of transcendence in its power of literally naming, and thus partially distancing, its own failure to engage in the real.” 

Modernism attempts at representing the real, but cannot do so and raises a paradox: it “resists commodification” but is nonetheless part of it, thus part of the social and cultural superstructure of society, which it denies. Denying being part of the capitalist mass commodity is the very core of modern failure to represent the real. 

Post-Modernism

• Characteristics 

1. Culture become the prominent part of the Post-Modernism with logical reason. Writers try to use cultural parodies. 

2. Writers emphasised on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random Reformation materials one can find in literature. 

3. A rejection of High and Low, and the Popular Culture become the choice of materials to produce the literary art. 

4. Poetry seems became more documentary (T S Eliot) and prose become more Poetics (e.g. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf) 

5. In this movement of Post-Modernism, the objectivity provided by the third person narrators with fixed narrative point of views and clear cut moral positions. 

6. Post-Modernist writers change their tendency towards the reflectivity or the self consciousness about the production of art. Because of this they become more attentive towards their own status as a production owner as something constructed and consumed in particular ways. 

7. Like modern writers, all post modern writers follow the same ideas like rejection of boundaries, rigid genre distinctions, etc. They emphasize on parody, irony and easily taking literature with their playfulness. 

•  Effects on Literature 

Postmodernism appears as a more cynical genre. Some of its features are the blurring of boundaries, pastiche and grotesque. It does not attempt to represent the world, since it is virtual, and would thus fail to describe it. Postmodernism seems to be very different from modernism on the ground that:

“If the work of art really is a commodity, it might as well admit it” and “become aesthetically what it is economically”.

Eagleton also suggests that postmodersism aims at parodying the commodity production, without adding any meaning in it; if meaning was added in the pastiche, making it parody, it would serve to alienate the self from reality, and according to postmodern thought, there is no reality it can be alienated from. All these features aim at empting the social content of art.

Conclusion

Thus, Eagleton in his essay Capitalism, Modernism, and Post-Modernism, assessed the features of literature genres characteristic of capitalist stages, in order to draw a critical and theoretical approach of literature.