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"This was during that great phase of my life – anyone’s life – your twenties, when your brain has been formatted and disciplined by university, and you are free to read widely."

— Dyer, Geoff (b. 1958)

Author

Theory in the Air

Date

June 27, 2025

Metaphor

"This was during that great phase of my life – anyone’s life – your twenties, when your brain has been formatted and disciplined by university, and you are free to read widely."

Metaphor in Context

The other Eagleton-related thing that happened while I was at Oxford was that he invited this old duffer to come and waffle on. As with the debate I didn’t understand what he was droning on about. And that was of course Raymond Williams. My tutor, Valentine Cunningham, had urged us to read Keywords and maybe he’d even suggested reading Culture and Society, but at that point you wouldn’t bother reading a book like that, because you were doing Lawrence, say, for one week, so you’d only read the bits on Lawrence in these more general books. So I was aware of Williams’ name, but it was only after I left university that I started reading books like his. There was a lot of Theory in the air in those days. This was during that great phase of my life – anyone’s life – your twenties, when your brain has been formatted and disciplined by university, and you are free to read widely. All these people, connected and linked in various ways through that pervasive word ‘ideology’, were sort of poured into the willing bucket of my head – Foucault, Adorno, Berger and Williams.