Fifty years ago, Terry Eagleton—one of the foremost and polemical cultural critics and literary theorists—was appointed Fellow in English at Jesus College, Cambridge shortly after graduating from the university himself with a First in English. He was the youngest fellow in the history of the college since the eighteenth century,
Attention students who have gotten their summer reading assignments and probably haven’t thought about cracking them open yet, read this first. In How to Read Literature, Terry Eagleton helps readers deepen their experience by asking seemingly obvious questions, and pointing out which questions we don’t ask of the books we
For Terry Eagleton, writing is “exploratory.” “The act of writing is both a great delight to me in itself,” he explained in a recent interview on London’s Yale Books Blog, but it “also is constitutive of my thought.” As the author of more than forty books, which span the fields
What DID happen to Modernism? Bill Marx weighs in for the Arts Fuse in response to Robert Boyers’ review of Gabriel Josipovici‘s What Ever Happened to Modernism? in The New Republic. Modernism itself is no easy subject to define, which both reviewers point out in their articles, and the book
Anthropologist Mary Douglas’ controversial study of patterns in ancient world literature, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition was featured in an article in yesterday’s New York Times. Douglas explains that many famous ancient texts are misunderstood and many others have been completely neglected due to the literary style
Defining a Change: Literary Theory, Truth, and Fiction in the Digital Age
Terry Eagleton’s newest book The Event of Literature addresses literary theory and tackles the question—what is literature—utilizing a variety of theories. Each theory has its own historical perspective that is formed by morals, values, and events. It is this ever-changing standard used to define literature that Eagleton grapples with in
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