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
Terry Eagleton quotes about
ambitious world arena
Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world
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.
becoming confirmation theory
The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.
humanity bows insolence
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
hangover uprising aftermath
Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of '68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.
mistake play erosion
The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.
alternatives kind possibility
Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
way totems yahweh
Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.
literary-theory talking people
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
literary-theory marxism trade
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
mistake struggle men
What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons - reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.
self ego would-be
In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the 'imaginary' level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis . The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it.
slavery unions fruit
Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.
all-the-best radical position
Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.