Terry Eagleton
85 quotes
Biography
Terence Francis Eagleton is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of English Literature at Lancaster University.
"After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was."
"The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name."
"[A] great deal of what we believe we do not know firsthand; instead we have faith in the knowledge of specialists."
"All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all."
"Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I"who speaks of speaking?"
"Deconstruction... insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional."
"Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism."
"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."
"If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades."
"All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism."
"Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace."
"Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness."
"It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it."
"It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself."
"If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing."
"Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry."
"All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill."
"Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it."
"We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population and endless deferment of fulfillment."
"Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure."
"The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster."