Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton
Terence Francis "Terry" Eagleton FBA is a prominent British literary theorist, critic and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth22 February 1943
literary-theory literary-genre practice
What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .
reading understanding movement
Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.
humanity bows insolence
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
catholic taught backgrounds
I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.
strong world shame
God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
scratches savages
Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.
all-the-best radical position
Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
class working-class capitalism
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
self superstitions improvement
An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.
long actors lines
You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!
silly frustration self
It is silly to call fat people ''gravitationally challenged'' - a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
literary-theory marxism trade
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
reading space enabling
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.
responsibility media life-is
In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.