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
art needs sensitive
Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
names humanity arts-and-humanities
The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
art ideas looks
Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.
art years ducks
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.
art philosophy literature
The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
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.
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.
constitute core humanities men study university values worth
Real men study law and engineering, while ideas and values are for sissies. The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
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.
past viewpoints form
The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
thinking consciousness my-thoughts
All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.
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.