Tag Archives: Terry Eagleton

Getting to Know Henry James

I’m on a Henry James kick and am enthralled with “Daisy Miller” and “Washington Square.”

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Teachers as Literature’s Missionaries

If literature teaches foundational social values, then teachers can be seen as missionaries.

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Why I Think the Way I Think

I survey my intellectual history, especially the evolution of my thinking about literature’s impact on human behavior.

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Does Lightweight Lit Do Damage?

I look at how thinkers over the centuries have viewed so-called popular or lightweight literature.

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My “Last Lecture”

I share here my “last lecture” from my retirement ceremony. (But rest assured: I will not be retiring from this blog.)

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Nazis and the Classics

Do the classics make us better people. F. R. Leavis thinks so while Terry Eagleton disagrees and cites as an example concentration camp commandants who read Goethe.

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Can Lit Help Build an Egalitarian World?

Neo-Marxist literary theory calls for us to see literature as relevant to building an egalitarian society.

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Does Studying Lit Truly Change Things?

Some claims for literature’s power have been inflated, such as those of F. R. Leavis, and sometimes lit has failed to change bad people. Still, it can play an important role in our lives.

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Fish’s Claim that Lit is of No Use

Stanley Fish    Last week I was talking to my colleague in philosophy Alan Paskow about a Stanley Fish New York Times column. (Cancer update: Alan had one of the five tumors in his lungs removed two weeks ago through cyberknife surgery.) Although an old post—last January—it had stuck with us because it contradicts so […]

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