Terry Eagleton Quotes

A collection of quotes by Terry Eagleton.

Terry Eagleton is a renowned British literary critic, cultural theorist, and writer. Born on February 22, 1943, in Salford, England, Eagleton has made significant contributions to the fields of literary criticism, Marxism, and postmodernism.

Eagleton studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received his bachelor's degree in English literature. He later attained a doctorate from Jesus College, Cambridge. Throughout his career, Eagleton held numerous prestigious academic positions, including the Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester.

Known for his sharp intellect and engaging writing style, Eagleton has written extensively on topics such as literary theory, ideology, and postcolonialism. His most notable works include "Literary Theory: An Introduction," "The Ideology of the Aesthetic," and "Why Marx Was Right."

Eagleton is renowned for his engagement with Marxism and his critical analysis of the relationship between literature, culture, and politics. He is highly regarded for his ability to make complex philosophical ideas accessible to a wider audience.

Not just limited to academia, Eagleton's writings have gained recognition outside of the scholarly community, contributing to public discussions and debates on a broad range of social and political issues.

Throughout his career, Eagleton has earned numerous accolades, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his book "Saints and Scholars." His work continues to shape the fields of literary criticism and cultural theory, and he remains an influential figure in contemporary intellectual discourse.

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intell

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.

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that i

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

Truth

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, y

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Inspirational Capitalism Apathy Resistance Socialism Marxism Inevitability

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

History

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagi

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.

Imagination

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.

Music Science Evil

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notio

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

Future

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students

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.

Poetry

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private s

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

Age

If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life,

If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.

History

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, dev

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Books

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expen

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.

Modern Modernism

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subh

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

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time

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.

Ideology

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the c

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly not constructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

Propaganda

It is silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged --

It is silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged -- a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.

Politics

For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs

For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.

Positive

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrati

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

Home

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Ch

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.

Faith

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided iden

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

History