Quote #6

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.

More from Terry Eagleton

  1. Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of '68, a way of keeping the revolution wa…
  2. [Literature] is organised violence committed on ordinary speech.
  3. It is silly to call fat people 'gravitationally challenged', a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of poli…
  4. Ideaology is a contemporary mythology.
  5. 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 hum…
  6. Chaucer was a class traitor Shakespeare hated the mob Donne sold out a bit later Sidney was a nob.
  7. Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of ... revolutionary avant-gardism.
  8. All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the…

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