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Men And Women Do Not Easily Submit To A Power That Does Not Weave Itself Into The Texture Of Their Daily Existence - One Reason Why Culture Remains So Politically Vital. Civilisation Cannot Get On With Culture, And It Cannot Get On Without It.

-Terry Eagleton

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Men And Women Do

Terry Eagleton

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Men And Women Do Not Easily Submit To A Power That Does Not Weave Itself Into The Texture Of Their Daily Existence - One Reason Why Culture Remains So Politically Vital. Civilisation Cannot Get On With Culture, And It Cannot Get On Without It.

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Any Attempt To Define Literary Theory In Terms Of A Distinctive Method Is Doomed To Failure.

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Nothing In Human Life Is Inherently Private.

[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.

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.

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From The Viewpoint Of Political Power, Culture Is Absolutely Vital. So Vital, Indeed, That Power Cannot Operate Without It. It Is Culture, In The Sense Of The Everyday Habits And Beliefs Of A People, Which Beds Power Down, Makes It Appear Natural And Inevitable, Turns It Into Spontaneous Reflex And Response.

The Conversion Of Agnostic High Tories To The Anglican Church Is Always Rather Suspect. It Seems Too Pat And Predictable, Too Clearly A Matter Of Politics Rather Than Faith.

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It Is Difficult To Think Of An Origin Without Wanting To Go Back Beyond It.

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Historical Determinism Is A Recipe For Political Quietism.

Like All The Best Radical Positions, Then, Mine Is A Thoroughly Traditionalist One.

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Americans Use The Word "dream" As Often As Psychoanalysts Do.

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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.

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.

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Literary Theory

What Persuades Men And Women To Mistake Each Other From Time To Time For Gods Or Vermin Is Ideology. One Can Understand Well Enough How Human Beings May Struggle And Murder For Good Material Reasons - Reasons Connected, For Instance, With Their Physical Survival. It Is Much Harder To Grasp How They May Come To Do So In The Name Of Something As Apparently Abstract As Ideas. Yet Ideas Are What Men And Women Live By, And Will Occasionally Die For.

Yahweh Is Presented In The Jewish Bible As Stateless And Nationless. He Can’t Be Used As A Totem Or Fetish In That Way.

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If The Masses Are Not Thrown A Few Novels , They May React By Throwing Up A Few Barricades.

Literary Theory

For The Liberal State To Accommodate A Diversity Of Beliefs While Having Few Positive Convictions Is One Of The More Admirable Achievements Of Civilization.

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I Attacked Dawkins's Book On God Because I Think He Is Theologically Illiterate.

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.

Literary Theory

Successful Revolutions Are Those Which End Up By Erasing All Traces Of Themselves.

We Face A Conflict Between Civilisation And Culture, Which Used To Be On The Same Side. Civilisation Means Rational Reflection, Material Wellbeing, Individual Autonomy And Ironic Self-doubt; Culture Means A Form Of Life That Is Customary, Collective, Passionate, Spontaneous, Unreflective And Arational.

All Consciousness Is Consciousness Of Something: In Thinking I Am Aware That My Thought Is 'pointing Towards' Some Object.

Deconstruction Insists Not That Truth Is Illusory But That It Is Institutional.

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.

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?

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.

The Frontier Between Public And Private Shifts From Time To Time And Culture To Culture.

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.

The Truth Is That Liberal Humanism Is At Once Largely Ineffectual, And The Best Ideology Of The 'human' That Present Bourgeois Society Can Muster.

What's Wrong With A Bit Of Nostalgia Between Friends? I Think Nostalgia Sometimes Gets Too Much Of A Bad Press.

History Works Itself Out By An Inevitable Internal Logic.

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.

Understanding Is Always In Some Sense Retrospective, Which Is What Hegel Meant By Remarking That The Owl Of Minerva Flies Only At Night.

Post-structuralism Is Among Other Things A Kind Of Theoretical Hangover From The Failed Uprising Of ‘68, A Way Of Keeping The Revolution Warm At The Level Of Language, Blending The Euphoric Libertarianism Of That Moment With The Stoical Melancholia Of Its Aftermath.

Ivory Towers Are As Rare As Bowling Alleys In Tribal Cultures.

It Is Language Which Speaks In Literature, In All Its Swarming 'polysemic' Plurality, Not The Author Himself.

Literature Transforms And Intensifies Ordinary Language, Deviates Systematically From Everyday Speech.

Nations Sometimes Flourish By Denying The Crimes That Brought Them Into Being. Only When The Original Invasion, Occupation, Extermination Or Usurpation Has Been Safely Thrust Into The Political Unconscious Can Sovereignty Feel Secure.

Anyone Can Be Tolerant Of Those Who Are Tolerant.

Ideology... Is A Kind Of Contemporary Mythology, A Realm Which Has Purged Itself Of Ambiguity And Alternative Possibility.

All Propaganda Or Popularization Involves A Putting Of The Complex Into The Simple, But Such A Move Is Instantly Deconstructive. For If The Complex Can Be Put Into The Simple, Then It Cannot Be As Complex As It Seemed In The First Place; And If The Simple Can Be An Adequate Medium Of Such Complexity, Then It Cannot After All Be As Simple As All That.

Like The Rest Of Us, Tom Paulin Is A Bundle Of Contradictions. At Its Finest, His Work Is Brave, Adventurous, Original And Wonderfully Idiosyncratic.

It Is True That Too Much Belief Can Be Bad For Your Health.

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.

Today, Nostalgia Is Almost As Unacceptable As Racism.

Most Poetry In The Modern Age Has Retreated To The Private Sphere, Turning Its Back On The Political Realm.

Universities Are No Longer Educational In Any Sense Of The Word That Rousseau Would Have Recognised. Instead, They Have Become Unabashed Instruments Of Capital. Confronted With This Squalid Betrayal, One Imagines He Would Have Felt Sick And Oppressed.

Theology, However Implausible Many Of Its Truth Claims, Is One Of The Most Ambitious Theoretical Arenas Left In An Increasingly Specialized World

I Enjoy Popularisation And I Think I'm Reasonably Good At It. I Also Think It's A Duty. It's Just So Pedagogically Stupid To Forget How Difficult One Found These Ideas Oneself To Begin With.

All Desire Springs From A Lack, Which It Strives Continually To Fill.

Capitalism Cannot Survive Without A Working Class, While The Working Class Can Flourish A Lot More Freely Without Capitalism.

I Say That Virtue Is Really All About Enjoying Yourself, Living Fully; But Of Course It Is Far From Obvious What Living Fully Actually Means.

Rousseau Ranks Among The Great Educational Theorists Of The Modern Era, Even If He Was The Last Man To Put In Charge Of A Classroom. Young Adults, He Thought, Should Be Allowed To Develop Their Capabilities In Their Distinctive Way.

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