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Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.

Terry Eagleton

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Terry Eagleton
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 22
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Theorist
Non-Fiction Writer
Researcher
University Teacher
Writer
Salford
Greater Manchester
Life
Forms
Identity
Demand
Terms
Term
Language
Voiced
Political
Shaped
Form
Demands

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To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.
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Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
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Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
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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.
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In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.
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The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
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The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.
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Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
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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.
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Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
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The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
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There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
Terry Eagleton
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In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.
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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.
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Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world
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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.
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Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.
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