A Quote by Terry Eagleton

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'
The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.
I try to play the bare essence, to let everything be just what it's supposed to be in that particular spot...You have many things to pick from when you're playing, so you try to train yourself to pick out the best things that you know.
The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
I just see many, many untruthful things. I see tone, the word tone. The tone is such hatred. I'm really not a bad person, by the way.The tone is such - I do get good ratings, you have to admit that.
It's ignorant! The stereotype is guys that are weak and have failing relationships write about how sad they are. If you listen to our songs, not one of them has that tone. Emo is bullshit! If people want to take it for the literal sense of the word, then yes, we're an emotional band, we put a lot of thought into what we do. People always try to stereotype us, but we don't fit the emo stereotype.
We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.
Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new and complex things in relation to the things we already know... once you pick a metaphor it will guide your thinking.
Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, "That were to consider it too curiously.
I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.
The Soviet Union came apart along ethnic lines. The most important factor in this breakup was the disinclination of Slavic Ukraine to continue under a regime dominated by Slavic Russia. Yugoslavia came apart also, beginning with a brutal clash between Serbia and Croatia, here again 'nations' with only the smallest differences in genealogy; with, indeed, practically a common language. Ethnic conflict does not require great differences; small will do.
Most of my films - if you look at the tone, apart from 'Shadows,' which is straight-up comedy - the tone is a mix between comedy and pathos, and I really love that.
I have a great advantage over many of my colleagues inasmuch as my students bring with them to class their own personal knowledge of national, regional, religious, ethnic, occupational, and family folklore traditions.
I think that poetry is an act of celebration, that anytime you're writing a poem, it means that you're celebrating something, even if it's a sad poem, if it's an angry poem, a political poem or anything at all. The fact that you're taking the time and energy to pick up this thing and hold it to the light, and say, "Let's take some time to consider this," means that you've deemed it worthy enough to spend time on - which, in my opinion, is celebrating.
There are two versions of math in the lives of many Americans: the strange and boring subject that they encountered in classrooms and an interesting set of ideas that is the math of the world, and is curiously different and surprisingly engaging. Our task is to introduce this second version to today's students, get them excited about math, and prepare them for the future.
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