Literary criticism proverbs

Page 4

◆ The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.

- Oscar Wilde98

◆ What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive... An art, a whole civilization, may at any time slip through men's fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery. If we are alive when such a thing is happening we shall hardly notice it until too late; and it is most unlikely that we shall know its causes.

- C.S. Lewis98

◆ The history of literature is very far from being one of simple progress.

- C.S. Lewis98

◆ Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.

- C.S. Lewis98

◆ Attempts to connect men's circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful.

- C.S. Lewis98

◆ In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people.

- C.S. Lewis98

◆ When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature

- TODOROV TZVETAN98

◆ Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

- Susan Sontag98

◆ If you love my work, you are a good critic. If you do not love my work, you are a 'not good' critic.

- Roman Payne98

◆ I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. [p.92]

- Northrop Frye98

◆ I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv.

- Jess C. Scott98

◆ We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us. Above all, we have to look at the total design of a writer's work, the title he gives to it, and the his main theme, which means his point in writing it, to understand that literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows. [p.32]

- Northrop Frye98

◆ Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he'd replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he'd kept that job?

- Christopher Hitchens98

◆ However, Hardy's relationship with nature is a dialectical one. While he indicates that he recognizes how human perception shapes nature, he nevertheless accepts nature as possessed of its own agency, as working through its cycle regardless of human perception, understanding, or attempted control. In essence, it claims a power apart from that with which humans may have imbued it. Even when humanity has lost faith in the possibility of renewal through nature, nature as Hardy describes it fights back, attempting to force human consciousness to acknowledge her power, her ability to transform life.

- Shirley A. Stave98

◆ I tossed up whether I'd see [the critic] or not: I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried significance he would discover of which I was unaware and the faults I was tired of facing.

- Graham Greene98