Quote

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.

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
Within
Frame
Initial
Understanding
Transform
Generate
Reading
Features
Initials
Comes
Originals
Linear
Next
Affair
Interpret
Retrospectively
Others
Original
Straightforward
Highlighting
May
Merely
Reference
Speculations
Movement
Speculation
Cumulative

More quotes by Terry Eagleton

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The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
Terry Eagleton
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
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Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Terry Eagleton
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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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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
Terry Eagleton
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Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
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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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Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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It is silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged, a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
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Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.
Terry Eagleton
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For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.
Terry Eagleton
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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 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.
Terry Eagleton
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The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.
Terry Eagleton
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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
Terry Eagleton
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Terry Eagleton