Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the value of literature and art for their own sake, challenging materialistic views.
Terry Eagleton highlights how literature and art, often seen as lacking practical utility, attract individuals who reject capitalist values. He suggests that engaging in artistic endeavors solely for pleasure is seen as a threat to conventional authority, where the emphasis on productivity and utility reigns. The pursuit of art for its intrinsic joy represents a rebellious stance against societal norms that equate worth with material gain.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the value of arts education.
Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.
PANTOMIME, n. A play in which the story is told without violence to the language. The least disagreeable form of dramatic action.
Dance training can't be separate from life training. Everything that comes into our lives is training. The qualities we admire in great dancing are the same qualities we admire in human beings: honesty, courage, fearlessness, generosity, wisdom, depth, compassion,and humanity.
In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!
So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it's hard, because everybody has style. You can't help it.
It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.
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