The Gatekeeper: A Memoir - Hardcover

Eagleton, Terry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312291221 ISBN 13: 9780312291228

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 2002

Synopsis

Oxford professor, best-selling author, preeminent literary critic, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, Terry Eagleton knows all about the claims of competing worlds. One of his earliest roles growing up Catholic in Protestant England was as "the gatekeeper"-the altar boy who at reverend mother's nod literally closed the door on young women taking the veil, separating the sanctity of the convent from earthly temptations and family obligations.

Often scathingly funny, frequently tender, and always completely engaging, The Gatekeeper is Eagleton's memoirs, his deep-etched portraits of those who influenced him, either by example or by contrast: his father, headmasters, priests, and Cambridge dons. He was a shy, bookish, asthmatic boy keenly aware of social inferiority yet determined to make his intellectual way. "Our aim in life," he writes of his working-class, Irish-immigrant-descended family, "was to have the words 'We Were No Trouble' inscribed on our tombstones." But Eagleton knew trouble was the point of it all. Opening doors sometimes meant rattling the knobs. At both Cambridge and Oxford, he gravitated toward dialectics and mavericks, countering braying effeteness with withering if dogmatic dissections of the class system.

The Gatekeeper mixes the soberly serious with the downright hilarious, skewer-sharp satire with unashamed fondness, the personal with the political. Most of it all it reveals a young man learning to reconcile differences and oppositions: a double-edged portrait of the intellectual as a young man.

About this title

About the Authors

Terry Eagleton is the author of, among other books, Literary Theory and The Truth About the Irish. He has also written a novel, several plays, and the screenplay for Derek Jarman's film Wittgenstein. He has been Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford, and Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and is currently Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester University.

Terry Eagleton has been Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford and a Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and is currently Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester University.

Reviews

Eagleton (The Truth About the Irish) has never been shy about expressing sharp, penetrating opinions. In this entertaining memoir of his childhood and intellectual development, Eagleton lives up to both sides of his reputation, coming off as both an astute social critic and a sharp-tongued cad. He expounds on his Cambridge adviser ("his role as a teacher was to relieve me of my ideas"), Mormons ("It was their lethal American blandness which proved hardest to take") and his Young Socialist cadre ("At one point in the group's career, venereal infections were circulating almost as rapidly as theories of neo-colonialism"). Clearly, Eagleton can be snide. But he can also be profound. He writes seriously and convincingly about Oscar Wilde, Wittgenstein, working-class intellectuals, Catholicism and liberal politics. Eagleton fiercely defends the radical left's ambitions and offers sharp critiques of globalization and the apparent triumph of capitalism. But he recognizes socialist failings his description of a typical leftist conference will elicit howls of laughter from those who have attended similar events. On his religious upbringing, Eagleton is even more damning. As an altar boy, he served as the "gatekeeper" in a convent whose nuns were never allowed to go outside or see a man. Later, he attended a seminary, which introduced him to the problems that have lately plagued the Church (how do you separate the boys from the men in a Catholic school? "[W]ith a crowbar," writes Eagleton). In little more than a hundred pages, Eagleton manages to be lewd, irritating, solemn and idealistic, all at the same time.--ith a crowbar," writes Eagleton). In little more than a hundred pages, Eagleton manages to be lewd, irritating, solemn and idealistic, all at the same time.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* Ireland has always provided England with some of its greatest wits. Past ages have seen Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde illuminating English letters; for the last several decades, Oxford, at least, has had Terry Eagleton. The brilliant and controversial Marxist literary theorist was born to Irish immigrants near Manchester and reared Catholic in a tight-knit exile community that also produced actor Albert Finney and dramatist Shelagh Delaney. This memoir begins with Eagleton's boyhood service as gatekeeper to a conventful of cloistered Carmelites, a job that set the pattern of his life, for as a critic he has stood between the sacred literary text and the commercial world outside. But his deep roots in the working class keep elitism at bay, and his sharp pen punctures the pretense of such false gatekeepers as the fellow Oxford dons whose shortcomings he details. Although it is serious about culture, this is a very funny book, with wet-your-pants-laughing passages about, say, teaching "distinctly non-penguin" American nuns in the 1960s, and Eagleton's "doddering, quasi-fascistic" Cambridge teachers, one of whom "later killed himself out of sheer boredom." The prolific Eagleton claims to need an Authors Anonymous group for his writing compulsion, but one trusts there is no such thing in Dublin, which is now his home. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

When celebrated literary critics reach retirement, they produce memoirs. These are often revelations about the academy's insides or classic coming-of-age tales about a poor lout's triumph over humble beginnings to reach the life of the mind. Eagleton's almost egregiously witty and amusing memoir is of the latter kind. His story chronicles the ascent of an Irish Catholic working-class boy to Oxbridge and international recognition as the author of classic studies such as Literary Theory and Aesthetic Ideology. The book differs from others in the genre, such as Sir Frank Kermode's Not Entitled and Marcel Reich-Ranicki's The Author of Himself in that Eagleton unflinchingly displays the sharp teeth with which he bit quite a few hands that fed him along the way. As a prominent Marxist critic, Eagleton has proved a matchless debunker of the shortcomings of trendy literary theory. As a memoirist, he is equally merciless about the admittedly ludicrous characters encountered in his life. But even in this personal recollection of petty power play in the church and the academy, the eloquent Marxist privileges analysis over genuine insight into himself or others. Missing from this book is Eagleton the human being, the man behind his clever words. Recommended for academic libraries and large public libraries. Ulrich Baer, NYU
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312291221
• ISBN 13: 9780312291228
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 178