GORDON PARSONS is bowled over by a skilfully stripped down and powerfully relevant production of Hamlet
The neoliberal jackboot stamping on a human face
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds an analysis of culture that explains why political conflicts today are focused more on values and identity than the economy and social questions
In which we accompany the Bard into Cymru to meet his musical accomplices, young and old
SUE TURNER is inspired by the example of a librarian’s struggle to confront the book-banning movement
ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes two exhibitions that blur the boundaries between art and community engagement
The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews I Am Martin Parr, September Says, The Monkey, and The Gorge
RITA DI SANTO applauds a touching and witty opener that touches a hot topic in Germany: the future of the immigrant population
SIMON PARSONS is discomfited by an unflichingly negative portrait of motherhood and its trials
The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms
Olivier Roy, translated by Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous
Hurst, £20
IN 1992 when the New Right’s neoliberal revolution was still in full flood, the Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton wrote an essay in which, with great prescience, he foretold a crisis of contemporary culture.
Taking the English literary canon as an example, he argued that right-wing intellectuals were turning literary theory — and by extension the canons of high culture — into an arena of intensive political contestation.
Eagleton wrote: “It is no doubt for this reason that the infighting over something as apparently abstruse as literary theory has been so symptomatically virulent; for what we are really speaking of here is the death of civilisation as we know it.
More from this author
GAVIN O’TOOLE explores the resistance expressed by central American artists to their own erasure by US imperialist policies
Here’s an antidote to the Venezuela election-induced tantrums of Western elites. GAVIN O’TOOLE reviews it
GAVIN O’TOOLE observes that the call for a new international framework for conflict mediation is fatally marred by a partisan position on the Isreali-Gazan conflict
The argument that labour parties, supported by conservative trade unions, are instrumental to capitalism has contemporary resonance, suggests GAVIN O’TOOLE
Similar stories
ALEX HALL is intrigued by a left-wing account of the cleavage between class-based politics and culture-based politics
GAVIN O’TOOLE explores the resistance expressed by central American artists to their own erasure by US imperialist policies
GORDON PARSONS negotiates an exhaustive biography of WH Auden that explores his growing detachment from England
Can the 19th-century philosopher be repackaged for the 21st century? JOHN KENDALL HAWKINS reviews a book that says so