Terry Eagleton: "The Death of Criticism?"

Lately I'm listening to a lot of lectures and it was a pleasure to find Terry Eagleton's videos.
As I have a degree in literature I have read two of his books that was translated into Brazilian Portuguese.
Terry, may I call you like this master?, has a great sense of humour and raises numerous important issuers this world is facing.
I feel like buying some of his books but now that I can listen to the sound of his voice I'll buy it in the original language.
I'm going to listen to another of his lectures. Have a great day!

Excerpts from this video: "What sort of society is it where the possible is always superior to the actual?"

34:04 "I mean, of course, the second 9/11, not the first (...) in 1971 where the US violently overthrew the democratic elected government of Salvador Allende of Chile and installed in his place a odious dictator who went on to kill far more people that ever were killed in the World Trade Centre."

The Brazilian Portuguese version of two of Terry Eagleton's books.

It was read and will be read again.

Susan Sontag' Against Interpretation: Plato' mimetic theory of art

In the essay "Against Interpretation" Susan Sontag exposes Plato's mimetic theory in one paragraph in a very  simple way:


"t is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.

Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious. Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an "imitation of an imitation." For Plato, art is neither particularly useful (the painting of a bed is no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense, true. And Aristotle's arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato's view that all art is an elaborate trompe l'oeil, and therefore a lie. But he does dispute Plato's idea that art
is useless. Lie or no, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.

In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art goes hand in hand with the assumption that art is always figurative. But advocates of the mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art is necessarily a "realism" can be modified or scrapped without ever moving outside the problems delimited by the mimetic theory."

I hope it helps. Sontag's book "Against Interpretation"  highlight the intrinsic values of art that doesn't need other discourses to be explained.