“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...”
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Author detail
Widely regarded as England's most influential living literary critic & theorist, Dr Eagleton currently serves as Distinguished Prof. of English Literature at the Univ. of Lancaster & as Visiting Prof. at the Nat'l Univ. of Ireland, Galway. He was Thomas Warton Prof. of English Literature at the Univ. of Oxford ('92-01) & John Edward Taylor Prof. of English Literature at the Univ. of Manchester 'til '08. He returned to The Univ. of Notre Dame in the Fall '09 semester as Distinguished Visitor in the English Dep't. He's written over 40 books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction ('83); The Ideology of the Aesthetic ('90) & The Illusions of Postmodernism ('96). He delivered Yale's '08 Terry Lectures & gave a Gifford Lecture in 3/10, titled The God Debate.
Quotes
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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...”
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“Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.”
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“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 th...”
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“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...”
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“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 bu...”
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“Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.”
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“For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.”
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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...”
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“Real men study law and engineering, while ideas and values are for sissies. The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.”
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“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 pu...”
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“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...”
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“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...”
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“The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.”
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“Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.”
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