Terry Eagleton Quotes About Literature
-
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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 .
→ -
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
→ -
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.
→ -
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Walter Benjamin Literary critic -
Slavoj Žižek Philosopher -
Mikhail Bakhtin Philosopher -
Richard Dawkins Ethologist -
Antonio Gramsci Writer -
Derek Jarman Film director -
Roland Barthes Philosopher -
Karl Marx Philosopher -
Roger Scruton Philosopher -
-
Louis Althusser Philosopher -
Perry Anderson Historian -
Martin Amis Novelist -
Jacques Derrida Philosopher -
Gyorgy Lukacs Philosopher -
Raymond Williams Novelist -
Edward Said Professor -
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Philosopher -
Alain Badiou Philosopher -
