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
books-and-reading derivative enabling flawed lack less longer mark mere pen positively readers repressed secondary seen shameful status within writer
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.
literary-theory apathy inevitable
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
truth-is deconstruction illusory
Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
democracy socialism negation
Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.
logic inevitable internals
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
racism today nostalgia
Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
ivory-tower culture towers
Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
waiting language
Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.
diversity unity culture
It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?
odds syntax literature
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.
civilization diversity achievement
For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.
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.