A Glimpse into the Trend of Western Current Event Theory

Abstract: Since the end of the 20th century, with people’s clear understanding of the great harmfulness of ideology and extreme weariness of cultural discourses and theoretical debates, the trend of returning to things has been set off in the Western theoretical circle and event has become one of the hottest topics. Event written by Slavoj Žižek, the theoretical representative of the Continental School, and The Event of Literature written by Terry Eagleton, the representative of the Anglo-American School, are the most cutting-edge achievements in the field of event. Although they have different views on the nature and function of event for their different standpoints, Žižek and Eagleton have completely the same focus and goals of thought because of their same theoretical context and ideological tendency, that is, they both turn their attention from linguistic discourse and cultural structure to material substance and objective reality; they both are committed to deconstructing existing linguistic discourses and cultural structures with the help of event. That’s enough to show that the current Western theorists, both the Mainland School and the Anglo-American School, have to a large extent walked out of the past quagmire of language games and moved towards a new realm of exploring and constructing things themselves.