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.
There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.
Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to play music that I liked, and even when I was in cover bands when I was a teenager we only played cover tunes that we liked. That was the simple morality that I grew up with.
Dance is not endangered - it will always find a way to express itself.
I love to go to the studio and stay there 10 or 12 hours a day. I love it. What is it? I don't know. It's life.
Every time you write a poem it’s apocalyptic. You’re revealing who you really are to yourself.
And then he danced,-all foreigners excel the serious Angels in the eloquence of pantomime;-he danced, I say, right well, with emphasis, and a'so with good sense-a thing in footing indispensable: he danced without theatrical pretence, not like a ballet-master in the van of his drill'd nymphs, but like a gentleman.
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