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
alternatives kind possibility
Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
humanity favour indulge
Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
moving simple adequate
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.
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.
literary-theory talking people
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
mean devastation today
... Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism....
book thinking illiterate
I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.
kind affair being-human
For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
evil reason rhyme
Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
christian party practice
Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being takes practice; and those who are brilliant at being human (what Christians call the saints) are the virtuosi of the moral sphere - the Pavarottis and Maradonas of virtue.
past vienna peculiar
There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.
war enemy sides
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
evil giants train
Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.
mean virtue obvious
I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.