Jeffrey Williams, who teaches at CMU, has a write-up on Terry Eagleton in the Chronicle:

Terry Eagleton has been a quintessential wanderer. Eagleton is probably the most well-known literary critic in Britain and the most frequently read expositor of literary theory in the world. His greatest influence in the United States has been through his deft surveys, variously on poststructural theory, Marxist criticism, the history of the public sphere, aesthetics, ideology, and postmodernism. His 1983 book, Literary Theory: An Introduction, which made readable and even entertaining the new currents in theory and which has been reprinted nearly 20 times, was a text that almost every literature student thumbed through during the 80s and 90s, and it still holds a spot in the otherwise sparse criticism sections of the local Barnes and Noble. His public position in Britain is such that Prince Charles once deemed him “that dreadful Terry Eagleton.” Not every literary theorist has received such public notice.

I was introduced to literary theory via the works of Eagleton, and will be grateful to him for that. Like Williams, I also found Eagleton’s Saint Oscar brilliant. It was witty and acerbic, full of play and also frankly political. I haven’t read Eagleton much recently, although he publishes more than most academics; but I’ve always admired the manner in which the political position that he has steadfastly held has only been strengthened, and not weakened, by the agility of his thinking and his language. Just minutes ago, I searched for, and found, a letter he had written in the Guardian after Derrida’s death. Although the way in which I had received my original Eagleton was as someone who, for political reasons, opposed deconstruction, even this brief letter reveals almost the opposite, which is Eagleton’s contempt for the stuffy shirts and his openness to new, liberating ways of reading.

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Tunku Varadarajan reviews Pervez Musharraf’s autobiography:

Toward the end of “In the Line of Fire” — in a chapter on the emancipation of women that has all the passion of a government circular — Pervez Musharraf writes that “rape, no matter where it happens in the world, is a tragedy and deeply traumatic for the victim. My heart, therefore, goes out to Mukhtaran Mai and any woman to whom such a fate befalls.”
Ms. Mukhtaran is a woman from a benighted village in Gen. Musharraf’s Pakistan: After her brother broke a taboo by having a (consensual) sexual relationship with a woman from a tribe deemed superior to his own, a village tribunal decreed that the brothers of the higher-status woman could right this wrong by having their way with Ms. Mukhtaran.
Gen. Musharraf relates in his book that Ms. Mukhtaran was dragged into a room and “came out visibly ruffled and partly undressed” — which is one way to describe a woman’s state after gang rape. Generals are allowed to be coy, occasionally, I suppose. Yet so coy is this general that he does not tell us that he — the omnipotent chief executive of Pakistan — ordered a travel ban on Ms. Mukhtaran when an NGO wished to fly her to the U.S. to publicize her plight. He did not, he said last year, want her “to bad-mouth Pakistan” abroad.
Not content with muzzling Ms. Mukhtaran — a woman who had, through her fight for justice, become a genuine Pakistani heroine and a force for social good — Gen. Musharraf told the editorial board of the Washington Post last year that rape had become “a money-making concern” in Pakistan. “A lot of people say that if you want to go abroad and get a visa from Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped.”
This jaunty little aperçu about entrepreneurial rape doesn’t appear on the pages of “In the Line of Fire.” Indeed, there’s much else that is missing from Gen. Musharraf’s account of his life and times. The book is not so much an autobiography as a highly selective auto- hagiography, by turns self-congratulatory, narcissistic and mendacious.

More.

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