Terry Eagleton Quotes - Page 4

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• With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

  Terry Eagleton

  Home, Character, Plot

  "A puritan at play" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. March 15, 2008.

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• Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.

  Terry Eagleton

  Racism, Today, Nostalgia

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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.

  Terry Eagleton

  Thinking, Too Much, Nostalgia

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• Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

  Terry Eagleton

  Literary Theory, Method, Term

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.172, John Wiley & Sons

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• Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

  Terry Eagleton

  Political, Age, Spheres

  "Milton's republic" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. December 8, 2008.

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• Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.

  Terry Eagleton

  Evil, Reason, Rhyme

  Terry Eagleton (2010). “On Evil”, p.3, Yale University Press

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• History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.

  Terry Eagleton

  Logic, Inevitable, Internals

  "Why Marx Was Right". Book by Terry Eagleton, 2011.

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• If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.

  Terry Eagleton

  Law, Class, Iron

  1993 In the London Review of Books, 2 Dec

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• Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.

  Terry Eagleton

  Dream, Use

  "Age of innocence" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. July 25, 2008.

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• Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

  Terry Eagleton

  Political, Historical, Recipes

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Why Marx Was Right”, p.46, Yale University Press

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• The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.

  Terry Eagleton

  Names, Humanity, Should

  "The death of universities" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. December 17, 2010.

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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.

  Terry Eagleton

  Mistake, Erosion, Play

  Terry Eagleton (2013). “How to Read Literature”, p.2, Yale University Press

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• Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.

  Terry Eagleton

  Lying, Imagination, United States

  "Age of innocence" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. July 25, 2008.

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• I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

  Terry Eagleton

  Catholic, Taught, Backgrounds

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• The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.

  Terry Eagleton

  Struggle, Heart, Political

  "Culture conundrum" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. May 20, 2008.

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• There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

  Terry Eagleton

  Past, Vienna, Peculiar

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• It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

  Terry Eagleton

  Literary Theory, Marxism, Trade

  "Why Marx Was Right". Book by Terry Eagleton, 2011.

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• Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.

  Terry Eagleton

  Yahweh, Way, Totems

  "Religion for radicals: An interview with Terry Eagleton". Interview with Nathan Schneider, blogs.ssrc.org. September 17, 2009.

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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

  Civilization, Diversity, Achievement

  "The liberal supremacists" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. April 24, 2009.

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• It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?

  Terry Eagleton

  Diversity, Unity, Culture

  "Those in power are right to see multiculturalism as a threat" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. February 20, 2007.

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• It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

  Terry Eagleton

  Sympathy, Lying, Writing

  "What would Rousseau make of our selfish age?" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. June 27, 2012.

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• It is true that some liberals and humanists, along with the laid-back Danes, deny the existence of evil. This is largely because they regard the word 'evil' as a device for demonising those who are really nothing more than socially unfortunate.

  Terry Eagleton

  Evil, Laid Back, Deny

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• In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the 'imaginary' level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it.

  Terry Eagleton

  Self, Ego, Would Be

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.147, John Wiley & Sons

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• Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.

  Terry Eagleton

  Waiting, Language

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.151, John Wiley & Sons

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• It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.

  Terry Eagleton

  Important, Ideology, Make Sense

  Terry Eagleton (1991). “Ideology: An Introduction”, p.14, Verso

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