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
character home plot
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.
thinking difficult
It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
jesus lying father
To declare in St John's words that Jesus and the Father are one is to claim that Jesus's dependence on the Other is not self-estrangement but self-ful lment. At the core of his identity ..lies nothing but unconditional love.
law class iron
If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.
literary-theory literary-genre practice
What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .
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.
lying order doing-nothing
If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
derrida
When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.
humanity bows insolence
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
catholic taught backgrounds
I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.
men past trying
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
strong world shame
God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
scratches savages
Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.
all-the-best radical position
Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.