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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.

-Terry Eagleton

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The Most Common Mistake

Terry Eagleton

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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.

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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.

As Far As Belief Goes, Postmodernism Prefers To Travel Light: It Has Beliefs, To Be Sure, But It Does Not Have Faith

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 .

Literary Theory

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.

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

Socialism Is The Completion Of Democracy, Not The Negation Of It.

The British Are Supposed To Be Particularly Averse To Intellectuals, A Prejudice Closely Bound Up With Their Dislike Of Foreigners. Indeed, One Important Source Of This Anglo-saxon Distaste For Highbrows And Eggheads Was The French Revolution, Which Was Seen As An Attempt To Reconstruct Society On The Basis Of Abstract Rational Principles.

Schizophrenic Language Has In This Sense An Interesting Resemblance To Poetry.

Reading A Text Is More Like Tracing This Process Of Constant Flickering Than It Is Like Counting The Beads On A Necklace.

Cynicism And Naivety Lie Cheek By Jowl In The American Imagination; If The United States Is One Of The Most Venal Nations On Earth, It Is Also One Of The Most Earnestly Idealistic.

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

Christian Faith, As I Understand It, Is Not Primarily A Matter Of Signing On For The Proposition That There Exists A Supreme Being, But The Kind Of Commitment Made Manifest By A Human Being At The End Of His Tether, Foundering In Darkness, Pain, And Bewilderment, Who Nevertheless Remains Faithful To The Promise Of A Transformative Love.

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.

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.

History Works Itself Out By An Inevitable Internal Logic.

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

Literary Theory

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

Scratch A Schoolboy And You Find A Savage.

Today, Nostalgia Is Almost As Unacceptable As Racism.

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

If We Were Not Called Upon To Work In Order To Survive, We Might Simply Lie Around All Day Doing Nothing.

People Do Evil Things Because They Are Evil. Some People Are Evil In The Way That Some Things Are Coloured Indigo. They Commit Their Evil Deeds Not To Achieve Some Goal, But Just Because Of The Sort Of People They Are.

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.

I Value My Catholic Background Very Much. It Taught Me Not To Be Afraid Of Rigorous Thought, For One Thing.

A Truly Common Culture Is Not One In Which We All Think Alike, Or In Which We All Believe That Fairness Is Next To Godliness, But One In Which Everyone Is Allowed To Be In On The Project Of Cooperatively Shaping A Common Way Of Life.

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.

Virtue Is Something You Have To Get Good At, Like Playing The Trombone Or Tolerating Bores At Parties. Being A Virtuous Human Being Takes Practice; And Those Who Are Brilliant At Being Human (what Christians Call The Saints) Are The Virtuosi Of The Moral Sphere - The Pavarottis And Maradonas Of Virtue.

The Liberal State Is Neutral Between Capitalism And Its Critics Until The Critics Look Like They Are Winning.

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

Nothing In Human Life Is Inherently Private.

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.

An Enlightened Trust In The Sovereignty Of Human Reason Can Be Every Bit As Magical As The Exploits Of Merlin, And A Faith In Our Capacity For Limitless Self-improvement Just As Much A Wide-eyed Superstition As A Faith In Leprechauns.

After All, If You Do Not Resist The Apparently Inevitable, You Will Never Know How Inevitable The Inevitable Was.

Literary Theory

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.

Negativity Is Often Looked Upon [in The Usa] As A Kind Of Thought Crime. Not Since The Advent Of Socialist Realism Has The World Witnessed Such Pathological Upbeatness.

If History, Philosophy And So On Vanish From Academic Life, What They Leave In Their Wake May Be A Technical Training Facility Or Corporate Research Institute. But It Will Not Be A University In The Classical Sense Of The Term, And It Would Be Deceptive To Call It One.

Evil Is Unintelligible. It Is Just A Thing In Itself, Like Boarding A Crowded Commuter Train Wearing Only A Giant Boa Constrictor. There Is No Context Which Would Make It Explicable.

Genuine Equality Means Not Treating Everyone The Same, But Attending Equally To Everyone’s Different Needs.

Postmodernism Is Among Other Things A Sick Joke At The Expense Of... Revolutionary Avant-gardism.

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

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.

Evil May Be 'unscientific' But So Is A Song Or A Smile.

Imagine Someone Holding Forth On Biology Whose Only Knowledge Of The Subject Is 'the Book Of British Birds,' And You Have A Rough Idea Of What It Feels Like To Read Richard Dawkins On Theology.

It Is Silly To Call Fat People "gravitationally Challenged", A Self-righteous Fetishism Of Language Which Is No More Than A Symptom Of Political Frustration.

Historical Determinism Is A Recipe For Political Quietism.

Those Who Sentimentally Indulge Humanity Do It No Favours.

Language, Identity And Forms Of Life Are The Terms In Which Political Demands Are Shaped And Voiced.

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.

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

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.

The German Philosopher Walter Benjamin Had The Curious Notion That We Could Change The Past. For Most Of Us, The Past Is Fixed While The Future Is Open.

One Side-effect Of The So-called War On Terror Has Been A Crisis Of Liberalism. This Is Not Only A Question Of Alarmingly Illiberal Legislation, But A More General Problem Of How The Liberal State Deals With Its Anti-liberal Enemies.

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.

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.

Irish Fiction Is Full Of Secrets, Guilty Pasts, Divided Identities. It Is No Wonder That There Is Such A Rich Tradition Of Gothic Writing In A Nation So Haunted By History.

Man Eternally Tries To Get Back To An Organic Past That Has Slipped Just Beyond His Reach.

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.

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

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

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

Dawkins Considers That All Faith Is Blind Faith, And That Christian And Muslim Children Are Brought Up To Believe Unquestioningly. Not Even The Dim-witted Clerics Who Knocked Me About At Grammar School Thought That.

I Liked Early Amis A Lot, But I Stopped Reading Him Some Time Ago. I Admire Hitchens On Literary Topics - I Think He Is Very Astute. Mcewan, I Read A Bit. But I Suppose It's More The Ideological Phenomenon That They Represent Together That Interests Me.

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?

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

The Past Can Be Used To Renew The Present, Not Just To Bury It.

There Seems To Be Something In Humanity Which Will Not Bow Meekly To The Insolence Of Power.

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

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

God Chose What Is Weakest In The World To Shame The Strong.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

All Communication Involves Faith; Indeed, Some Linguisticians Hold That The Potential Obstacles To Acts Of Verbal Understanding Are So Many And Diverse That It Is A Minor Miracle That They Take Place At All.

Modern Capitalist Nations Are The Fruit Of A History Of Slavery, Genocide, Violence And Exploitation Every Bit As Abhorrent As Mao's China Or Stalin's Soviet Union.

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.

It Is Capitalism, Not Marxism, That Trades In Futures.

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.

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

In The Deep Night Of Metaphysics, All Cats Look Black.

The Truth Is That The Past Exists No More Than The Future, Even Though It Feels As Though It Does.

The Most Compelling Confirmation Of Marx's Theory Of History Is Late Capitalist Society. There Is A Sense In Which This Case Is Becoming Truer As Time Passes.

If It Is True That We Need A Degree Of Certainty To Get By, It Is Also True That Too Much Of The Stuff Can Be Lethal.

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

The Humanities Should Constitute The Core Of Any University Worth The Name.

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.

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!

The Political Currents That Topped The Global Agenda In The Late 20th Century - Revolutionary Nationalism, Feminism And Ethnic Struggle - Place Culture At Their Heart.

It Is Important To See That, In The Critique Of Ideology, Only Those Interventions Will Work Which Make Sense To The Mystified Subject Itself.

It Is False To Believe That The Sun Revolves Around The Earth, But It Is Not Absurd.

There Is An Insuperable Problem About Introducing Immigrants To British Values. There Are No British Values. Nor Are There Any Serbian Or Peruvian Values. No Nation Has A Monopoly On Fairness And Decency, Justice And Humanity.

Anyone Can Be Tolerant Of Those Who Are Tolerant.

If There Are Indeed Any Iron Laws Of History, One Of Them Is Surely That In Any Major Crisis Of The Capitalist System, A Sector Of The Liberal Middle Class Will Shift To The Left, And Then Shift Smartly Back Again Once The Crisis Has Blown Over.

In The End, The Humanities Can Only Be Defended By Stressing How Indispensable They Are; And This Means Insisting On Their Vital Role In The Whole Business Of Academic Learning, Rather Than Protesting That, Like Some Poor Relation, They Don't Cost Much To Be Housed.

The Role Of The Intellectual, So It Is Said, Is To Speak Truth To Power. Noam Chomsky Has Dismissed This Pious Tag On Two Grounds. For One Thing, Power Knows The Truth Already; It Is Just Busy Trying To Conceal It. For Another, It Is Not Those In Power Who Need The Truth, But Those They Oppress.

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.

Language Always Pre-exists Us: It Is Always Already 'in Place', Waiting To Assign Us Our Places Within It.

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

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

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.

When One Emphasizes, As Jacques Derrida Once Remarked, One Always Overemphasizes.

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.

Being Brought Up In A Culture Is A Matter Of Learning Appropriate Forms Of Feeling As Much As Particular Ways Of Thinking.

Capitalism Is The Sorcerer's Apprentice: It Has Summoned Up Powers Which Have Spun Wildly Out Of Control And Now Threaten To Destroy Us.the Task Of Socialism Is Not To Spur On Those Powers But To Bring Them Under Rational Human Control.

To Claim That Science And Religion Pose Different Questions To The World Is Not To Suggest That If The Bones Of Jesus Were Discovered In Palestine, The Pope Should Get Himself Down To The Dole Queue As Fast As Possible. It Is Rather To Claim That While Faith, Rather Like Love, Must Involve Factual Knowledge, It Is Not Reducible To It.

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.

Evil Is Often Supposed To Be Without Rhyme Or Reason.

Works Of Art Cannot Save Us. They Can Simply Render Us More Sensitive To What Needs To Be Repaired.

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.

Capitalism Will Behave Antisocially If It Is Profitable For It To Do So, And That Can Now Mean Human Devastation On An Unimaginable Scale. What Used To Be Apocalyptic Fantasy Is Today No More Than Sober Realism.

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.

The Kantian Imperative To Have The Courage To Think For Oneself Has Involved A Contemptuous Disregard For The Resources Of Tradition And An Infantile View Of Authority As Inherently Oppressive.

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.

For Aristotle, Goodness Is A Kind Of Prospering In The Precarious Affair Of Being Human.

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.

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.

You Can Tell That The Capitalist System Is In Trouble When People Start Talking About Capitalism.

Literary Theory

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.

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

The Government Spokesman Announces That There Is No Truth In The Charges Of Widespread Corruption Within The Cabinet; Nobody Believes Him; He Knows That Nobody Believes Him, We Know That He Knows It, And He Knows It Too.

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

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.

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

Poetry Is The Most Subtle Of The Literary Arts, And Students Grow More Ingenious By The Year At Avoiding It. If They Can Nip Around Milton, Duck Under Blake And Collapse Gratefully Into The Arms Of Jane Austen, A Lot Of Them Will.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Literary Theory

There Is No Way In Which We Can Retrospectively Erase The Treaty Of Vienna Or The Great Irish Famine. It Is A Peculiar Feature Of Human Actions That, Once Performed, They Can Never Be Recuperated. What Is True Of The Past Will Always Be True Of It.

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