I've had to read parts of Eagleton multiple times and still didn't get it. Is it only me? God, I feel dense and distracted. The Olympics are not making my studying any more enticing either. And even more abstruse and grounds for wanting to break something is Ferdinand Saussure's "Course in General Linguistics." What's the point of all those dumb illustrations? It's not like they're the shining light I'm waiting for, the all-appointed Messiah. Usually, I love learning through pictures, I'm a visual learner. But those pictures make me feel stupid. Am I really that dumb? Or am I of average intelligence with one part of my brain broken and malfunctioning?
Okay, so one thing I got that kind of puts things into perspective is the third paragraph of page 64 of Eagleton where he states that Romanticism and the nineteenth century focused on the author, New Criticism exclusively concerned itself with the text, and the Reception Theory brought attention to the intrinsic role of the reader.
If you asked me, it's not all or nothing. Why does one thing have to take all the credit? Why can't each theorist come to terms with the other and agree that in any reading of a text, the author, the text, and the reader contribute proportionately?
And if you want my honest opinion again, who the hell cares? Do I really have that much time in the rest of my dwindling life to break down the process of reading? Why can't I just enjoy a nice afternoon of reading a good entertaining book like Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, you know? Why must I have to wonder about all the microscopic machinations of reading? Really, if we broke down every fine minutiae of living and dissected it even further, we'd go crazy and stab ourselves to death.
So I've come to the resolution that theory and the means of survival don't go hand in hand. If you want to live to the utmost, do not read Eagleton and Rivkin and Ryan. If you want to be happy and airless, don't dare open the pages of any theory book. And if you need to take English 638, learn what you can, write the best papers you can write, let the teacher know you're trying your hardest, and let the rest fall away.
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I have to disagree about analyzing a text. I wouldn’t, if I were you, just toss these theorists away. Whether you like it or not, you analyze everything you read. As a matter of fact, you just analyzed Eagleton. Even though I don’t disagree with what you said about Eagleton, the point is you analyzed him. I enjoy reading books from the war eras and I analyze them from a historical standpoint, meaning I like to see how the writing is influenced by wars. The point is you can benefit a lot by learning all of these theorist and how they overlap each other.
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