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
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.
racism today nostalgia
Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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.
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.
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.
truth-is ideology humans
The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.