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
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.
communication miracle understanding
All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
night understanding owl
Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.
political identity demand
Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
democracy socialism negation
Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.
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.
reading practice literature
Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.
winning looks states
The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.
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.
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.
betrayal educational sick
Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed.
justice humanity fairness
There is an insuperable problem about introducing immigrants to British values. There are no British values. Nor are there any Serbian or Peruvian values. No nation has a monopoly on fairness and decency, justice and humanity.
literary-theory method term
Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.
hands population pursuit
We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population and endless deferment of fulfillment.