CCR 720: Eagleton (1976) "The Author as Producer"

Eagleton, Terry. "The Author as Producer." Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley: U California P, 1976. 59-76.

After situating the production of art as an industry in capitalist business (where art is a commodity to be consumed by audiences for a profit), Eagleton calls on the work of Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin to illustrate how one particular dramatic production redefines meanings of artistic form, artistic author, and artistic product. The artistic example Eagleton calls on in service of illustrating his argument is that of Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theatre,” where Brecht, in accordance to Benjamin’s Marxist theories, reproduces art in a way that transforms writers, actors, and audience members as collaborators in the making of the art form. As participants collaborating with the production of the drama, the form moves away from that of bourgeois theatre (where an audience acts as observer of a final product that is constructed for ‘easy’ mass consumption) to a form that uses “alienation effects” in order to show audiences some familiar occurrences in a disconnected and unfamiliar light. Eagleton distinguishes how art can be viewed from a production standpoint (analyzing the work, distribution, and consumption of art) and from an ideological standpoint (analyzing how art constructs, maintains, and relies upon ideological modes of representation). These perspectives for analyzing art aim to uncover and transform cultural and historical norms and in turn support the author’s overall argument that Marxism helps to liberate oppressed ideologies and systems of meaning making.

In regard to how definitions of author are reshaped, Eagleton explains that under Marxist theory the author is not the creator of a text, but is instead seen as a producer, “as a worker rooted in a particular history with particular materials at his disposal” (68). Eagleton cites Marxist Pierre Macherey who similarly views the author in this fashion: “the author is essentially a producer who works up certain given materials into a new product. The author does not make the materials with which he works: forms, values, myths, symbols, ideologies, come to him already worked-upon, as the worker in a car-assembly plant fashions his product from already-processed materials” (69).