Professor Terry Eagleton - 'Culture and the Death of God'
Tuesday 14 February and Wednesday 15 February
Professor Eagleton, Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University is giving the Firth Memorial Lectures 2012, as a guest of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. The lectures will explore the interaction between critical theory and religion in modern society, subjects on which Professor Eagleton has written and lectured extensively over the past 40 years.
According to The Independent, Professor Eagleton is ‘the man who succeeded F.R. Leavis as Britain’s most influential academic critic’. He has written around 50 books and was previously Professor of English Literature at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford.
His books include Literary Theory (1983) which remains to this day an academic best-seller, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), a best-selling memoir, The Gatekeeper (2001) and more recent works such as Holy Terror (2005) and Trouble with Strangers (2008).
He has been a leading figure in literary studies since the 1970s and is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the English Association. He has held visiting appointments at such universities as Cornell, Duke, Iowa, Melbourne, Notre Dame, Trinity College Dublin, and Yale.
Professor Tom O’Loughlin, of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham, said: "For several decades Terry Eagleton has been at the forefront of critical theory in literature and culture, and has also address the intersection of culture and religion in our society. These lifelong interests are reflected in the title Prof. Eagleton has given to his Firth Lectures: culture and the death of God. At a time when the government is calling for a greater involvement of faith groups in the Big Society, these lectures are both timely and significant."