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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.

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
Apart
Ethnic
Pick
Stereotype
Picks
Spot
Students
Odds
Literature
Metaphor
Sardonic
Many
Spots
Plodding
Things
Poem
Curiously
Like
Tone
Syntax

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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.
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Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
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It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
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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.
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Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
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Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
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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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What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
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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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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
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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.
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Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
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Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
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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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From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.
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It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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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.
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There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
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