Our conversation traversed the worlds of Derrida and Foucault, the political arena of the Sixties and Seventies, the decline of theory and the value in writing for public venues. Many jokes were made, laughs were shared, and I left encouraged to try on different writing styles. I also left convinced that one of the most important habits we can develop as writers is doing justice to our opponents’ arguments. That doesn’t mean, though, that we have to stop throwing punches.
Eagleton, a Marxist literary critic, has written eighty essays for the London Review of Books alone and published over fifty books, with four more books in the pipeline. His book Literary Theory: An Introduction is even an academic best seller, having sold over 750,000 copies. It’s no wonder, then, that the Independent has referred to him as “the man who succeeded F R Leavis as Britain’s most influential academic critic.” Our conversation confirms that the question uniting his many publications is: What is the meaning of literature? We talked over the phone in March and April.
sempre a proposito di scrittura, segnalo la lettera di Ali Smith a George Orwell sul perché scriviamo.
Dear George Orwell,
Why do we write? Given that words and reality, as you once put it, are so often « no liker » to each other « than chessmen to living beings ».
Because I’m writing to you now from a future no-one could have seen coming –– except maybe yourself, and H G Wells, and J G Ballard and the furthest-seeing writers over the centuries from Sophocles to Margaret Atwood.
Because everything you wrote gifts us with the knowledge
that words are the chesspieces by which the powers that be will play
their games with our lives. You know, as the current UK Prime Minister
puts it, that « human beings are creatures of the imagination », that
« people live by narrative ». Ali Smith, European Review of Books
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