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
thinking consciousness my-thoughts
All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.
thinking difficult
It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
believe thinking culture
A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life.
thinking too-much nostalgia
What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
book thinking illiterate
I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.
stupid thinking ideas
I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.
reading thinking together
I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.
thinking feelings matter
Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
thinking views tradition
The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.
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.