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
mean devastation today
... Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism....
mean different needs
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.
art philosophy literature
The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
derrida
When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.
believe earth sun
It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
school literary-theory facts
I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller.
important ideology critique
It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.
important prejudice revolution
The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.
christian pain commitment
Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.
men past trying
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
art years ducks
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
art needs sensitive
Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
believe government cabinets
The government spokesman announces that there is no truth in the charges of widespread corruption within the Cabinet; nobody believes him; he knows that nobody believes him, we know that he knows it, and he knows it too.
past doe truth-is
The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.