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Terry Eagleton Quotes about Reading

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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.

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.

Terry Eagleton
Reading, Practice, Literature
"Literary Theory: An Introduction". Book by Terry Eagleton, 1983.

Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.

Terry Eagleton
Reading, Understanding, Movement
Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.67, John Wiley & Sons

Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.

Terry Eagleton
Reading, Necklaces, Process
Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.111, John Wiley & Sons

I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.

Terry Eagleton
Reading, Thinking, Together

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Terry Eagleton
Book, Reading, Space
"Against The Grain". Book by Terry Eagleton, 1986.

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