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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
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
Speak
Swarming
Plurality
Speaks
Author
Literature
Language
More quotes by Terry Eagleton
Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
Terry Eagleton
If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
Terry Eagleton
The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Terry Eagleton
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
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
Terry Eagleton
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
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.
Terry Eagleton
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.
Terry Eagleton
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.
Terry Eagleton
It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
Terry Eagleton
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
Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
Terry Eagleton
Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Terry Eagleton
Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
Terry Eagleton
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.
Terry Eagleton
The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.
Terry Eagleton
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
Nothing in human life is inherently private.
Terry Eagleton
There is an insuperable problem about introducing immigrants to British values. There are no British values. Nor are there any Serbian or Peruvian values. No nation has a monopoly on fairness and decency, justice and humanity.
Terry Eagleton
Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.
Terry Eagleton