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Terry Eagleton Biography

Terence Francis "Terry" Eagleton FBA (born 22 February 1943) is a British literary theorist, critic and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.

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Terry Eagleton Quotes

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.

Body, Follow, Jesus, Justice, Love, Pain

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

Ideology, Important, Make Sense, See, Sense

I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U. S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller.

Academic, Become, Facts, Literary Theory, School, Subject

God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.

God, Shame, Strong, World

A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.

Astonishment, Fruitless, People, Toil

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.

Individuals, Life, Life Is, Media, Responsibility, Wealth

Ideology. . . is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.

Alternatives, Ideology, Kind, Mythology, Possibility, Purged

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.

Happen, Literature, Practice, Reading, Vital

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.

Achieve, Conscious, Effect, Ego, Self, Would Be

Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.

Tolerant

To declare in St John's words that Jesus and the Father are one is to claim that Jesus's dependence on the Other is not self-estrangement but self-ful lment. At the core of his identity. . lies nothing but unconditional love.

Jesus, Father, Lying, Lment, Unconditional

You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!

Actors, Different, Kind, Long, Sense

If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.

Lying, Might, Order, Simply, Survive

There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.

Bows, Humanity, Insolence, Meekly, Power

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.

Affair, Art, Ideas, Like, Pay, Sheer

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.

Football, Icons, Opium, Slavishly, Soccer, Speak

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Antithesis, Book, Mere, Reading, Secondary, Space

What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.

Gets, Nostalgia, Thinking, Too Much, Wrong

For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.

Achievement, Beliefs, Civilization, Diversity, Liberal

All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.

Aware, Consciousness, My Thoughts, Thinking, Thought

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Terry Eagleton Biography

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