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Terry Eagleton

Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme by Martin Jay Buy this book

Oscar Wilde called experience the name one gives to one’s mistakes, while for Samuel Johnson it was what hope triumphed over for those who married a second time. Emerson thought all experience was valuable, an opinion not shared by the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay. Plato and Spinoza saw it as a realm of illusion, to be contrasted with the pure light of reason. Jacques Derrida deeply disliked the notion, suspecting it of dark metaphysical tendencies. For William Blake, from whom Martin Jay takes the title of his absorbing new study, experience is a domain of false consciousness and fruitless desire. For Romantics like Keats, by contrast, it is the zone of sensuous immediacy in which truth is revealed. Truth, for the Keatsian sort of Romantic, means authenticity – a fidelity to one’s feelings and sensations – rather than how it is with the world.

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Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester. His books include Literary Theory, After Theory and, most recently, The Meaning of Life.