Terry Eagleton Quotes

British writer, academic and educator

Terence Francis Eagleton FBA (born February 22, 1943) is a British literary theorist, critics and philosopher. Eagleton is a Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, and as a former Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland.

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Alternative Names: Terence Francis Eagleton

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

Deconstruction... insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.