SOURCE: A review of The Function of Criticism, in New Statesman, October 5, 1984, p. 33.

In the following review, Montrose offers positive assessment of The Function of Criticism, though notes its similarity to his earlier work on Walter Benjamin.

Terry Eagleton's essay [The Function of Criticism] seeks to ‘recall criticism to its traditional role’—engagement in cultural politics—from what he considers a position of crisis, where it is narrowly preoccupied with literary texts and estranged from social life through confinement to Academe and ‘the literary industry’ (public relations branch). Central to his argument is Jürgen Habermas's notion of ‘the public sphere’: an arena which facilitates free and equal discourse, among individuals, on cultural questions. Eagleton's starting-point is early 18th-century England, where the coffee houses and clubs and such periodicals as Steele's Tatler and Addison's Spectator comprised a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ which sustained cultural consensus. That sphere's gradual disintegration...