SOURCE: “Tickling the Starving,” in Times Literary Supplement, March 28, 1997, p. 25.

In the following review, Pindar offers unfavorable assessment of The Illusions of Postmodernism.

“Speaking as a hierarchical, essentialistic, teleological, metahistorical, universalist humanist, I imagine I have some explaining to do.” Terry Eagleton begins and ends his latest book, The Illusions of Postmodernism, at a disadvantage to which he readily admits. Put at its crudest, postmodernism is in, hip, trendy, sexy. Marxism—or what he now prefers to call socialism—is not.

If his broad-brush approach to one of the most elusive movements of modern times appears unsatisfactory it is as well to remember that his target is not postmodernism proper but “what a particular kind of student today is likely to believe”. His own students—“too young to recall a mass radical politics”—have unthinkingly succumbed to a fashionable postmodern “sensibility”. It is understandable that a vigorous thinker...