"Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism."
Terence Francis Eagleton is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of English Literature at Lancaster University.
"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."
"Deconstruction... insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional."
"All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is pointing towards some object."
"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."
"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."
"Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism."