Terry Eagleton

And it therefore seems to me like more of a live possibility.

Or indeed, I remember, say, Terry Eagleton's book, why...

I can't...

What's it described? What's the title again? Something like, um, Why Communism Has Never Been Properly Tried or whatever, or The Case For.

Anyway, these kind of books, you know, they get, they get-

Mm.

Terry Eagleton is a very respectable academic thinker, and he can quite openly endorse this ideology.

So that seems to me to be an asymmetry.

Let's do a little case study relating to my own preferred hobby horse literature.

In 1983, Terry Eagleton's classic critical synopsis of literary theory, called Literary Theory, argued that English literature is not a thing.

And yet, literary theory somehow is a thing, or at least it was, but it shouldn't be.

Or something.

This ontology is well-fed.

It's rich and juicy.

So back to Terry Eagleton and literary theory.

Terry tells us that there's no good definition of literature.

Let's do a little case study relating to my own preferred hobby horse literature.

In 1983, Terry Eagleton's classic critical synopsis of literary theory, called Literary Theory, argued that English literature is not a thing.

And yet, literary theory somehow is a thing, or at least it was, but it shouldn't be.

Or something.

This ontology is well-fed.

It's rich and juicy.

So back to Terry Eagleton and literary theory.

Terry tells us that there's no good definition of literature.

And this brings me back to entropy.

In the last few episodes, I've been thinking about Terry Eagleton's distinction between what we might call the evil of demons and the evil of angels.

The demon is easy to understand.

The demon just smashes things.

Certain words like evil are strongly associated with religious views that are all about judging.

So, as I noted in the last podcast, I'm basing this on Terry Eagleton's theory of evil, which is not a moral theory, but rather a way of understanding characters in literature that people perceive as evil.

So by last podcast, you mean the last podcast on evil and not my podcast on science fiction, which was the actual last podcast.

Correct.