Terry Eagleton - Literary theory (1983)

24 Sourced Quotes

View all Terry Eagleton Quotes
Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.

Terry Eagleton
Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.

Terry Eagleton
Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

Terry Eagleton
All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.

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

Terry Eagleton
If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

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

Terry Eagleton
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.

Terry Eagleton
It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.

Terry Eagleton
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.

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

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

Terry Eagleton
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
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.

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
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.

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
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.

Terry Eagleton
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.

Terry Eagleton
If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.

Terry Eagleton
Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.

Terry Eagleton
What perished in the Soviet Union was Marxist only in the sense that the Inquisition was Christian

Terry Eagleton