Terry Eagleton Quotes

Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.

I want to put any number of assorted 'ists' - such as relativists, deconstructionists, destructivists, postmodernists, the more maudlin kind of pacifists and feminists - firmly in their place.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

Eighty per cent of my output is 'Mallory clowns on the Western canon,' and I'm happy to be that person.

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.

Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.

I think comedians have a function in society, which is to make fun of our icons.

In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.

I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods.

I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture.

Is there a sharper commentary on American culture and the world than The Simpsons?

Some years ago, I was invited to speak in Houston, Texas. They said I was a founder of 'postmodern theatre'. So I said to my office, 'This is ridiculous for me to go and speak about postmodern theatre when I don't know what it means, but... they're paying me a lot of money, so I'll go.'

The best cartoons work by making fun of sacred cows, in trying to inflict the uncomfortable.

Ksenia Sobchak as president is like Sergei Shnurov as an artist. It's satire. It's a very high-level art project.

'Suburbicon' feels like a last gasp of some kind of middle. It thinks it's both frivolous and serious. But, for that, you need a touch that George Clooney's never had.

Monty Python never directly said, 'We're liberals' - they just did their sketches, and you had to figure it out. Generally, they were anti-establishment, of course, making fun of the people in power. I think, comedians, that's their job - pointing out what other people might not notice and going, 'Yoo-hoo, over here.'

Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn't present it as evil but a collection of banalities.

Drag is pastiche and parody and satire. Drag queens are never meant to be stars. We make fun of stars. Drag queens are the people that 'point' at the star.

I look to icons like George Carlin, Chris Rock, and Richard Pryor on how to present these concepts of social change and subversiveness to an audience in a way that's palatable.

I tend to find comedy in dark places. I also tend to find comedy in taking on the status quo - which has always been something I find important.

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?