{"quotes":[{"text":"The notion of literature as only one of several avenues to a single typeof propositional knowledge is, of course, hardly the winning ticket in lit-crit today. More typical are sentiments that see such a notion as not even admissible, if at all desirable. The world of these academic refuseniks is, however, a bleak and sterile place. Disarmed by their own epistemic fiat, scholars cannot assert anything since they deny the idea of objective rationality. If they arrive at an insight whose truth they wish to defend – for example that truth and rationality are passé – they can’t do so because truth and rationality are constructed to be constructed.","author":"Peter Swirski","tags":["literary-criticism","reason"],"id":8212,"author_id":"Peter+Swirski"},{"text":"Literature has become merely a tool for culture studies.","author":"Anuradha Bhattacharyya","tags":["literary-criticism","literature","literature","studies"],"id":8795,"author_id":"Anuradha+Bhattacharyya"},{"text":"Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahab’s quest for the whale may be mad and “monomaniacal,” as it is frequently called, or even evil so far as he sacrifices his crew and ship to it, but evil or revenge are not the point of the quest. The whale itself may be only a “dumb brute,” as the mate says, and even if it were malignantly determined to kill Ahab, such an attitude, in a whale hunted to the death, would certainly be understandable if it were there. What obsesses Ahab is in a dimension of reality much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienating world that nothing normal in the human psyche can directly confront.The professed quest is to kill Moby Dick, but as the portents of disaster pile up it becomes clear that a will to identify with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element is what is really driving Ahab. Ahab has, Melville says, become a “Prometheus” with a vulture feeding on him. The axis image appears in the maelstrom or descending spiral (“vortex”) of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of Ahab’s crew: “The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world.” But the descent is not purely demonic, or simply destructive: like other creative descents, it is partly a quest for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the end between Ahab and the little black cabin boy Pip, who has been left so long to swim in the sea that he has gone insane. Of him it is said that he has been “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro . . . And the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps.”Moby Dick is as profound a treatment as modern literature affords of the leviathan symbolism of the Bible, the titanic-demonic force that raises Egypt and Babylon to greatness and then hurls them into nothingness; that is both an enemy of God outside the creation, and, as notably in Job, a creature within it of whom God is rather proud. The leviathan is revealed to Job as the ultimate mystery of God’s ways, the “king over all the children of pride” (41:34), of whom Satan himself is merely an instrument. What this power looks like depends on how it is approached. Approached by Conrad’s Kurtz through his Antichrist psychosis, it is an unimaginable horror: but it may also be a source of energy that man can put to his own use. There are naturally considerable risks in trying to do so: risks that Rimbaud spoke of in his celebrated lettre du voyant as a “dérèglement de tous les sens.” The phrase indicates the close connection between the titanic and the demonic that Verlaine expressed in his phrase poète maudit, the attitude of poets who feel, like Ahab, that the right worship of the powers they invoke is defiance.","author":"Northrop Frye","tags":["bible","demons","leviathan","literary-criticism","moby-dick","shakespeare","titans"],"id":12849,"author_id":"Northrop+Frye"},{"text":"I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.","author":"Harold Bloom","tags":["criticism","literary-criticism","poetry"],"id":17274,"author_id":"Harold+Bloom"},{"text":"If you were to stare at this box of matches, you could extract entire worlds out of it. If you search for tastes in a book, you will certainly find them because it was said: seek and ye shall find. But a critic should not rifle, search. Let him sit back with folded arms, waiting for the book to find him. Talents should not be sought with a microscope, a talent should let people know about itself by striking at all the bells.","author":"Witold Gombrowicz","tags":["literary-criticism","talent","writing-philosophy"],"id":29255,"author_id":"Witold+Gombrowicz"},{"text":"These are my habits and the way I spend my life: studying literature.","author":"Christine de Pizan","tags":["literary-criticism","literature","literature","passion","reading-books"],"id":39798,"author_id":"Christine+de+Pizan"},{"text":"CUSTOMER (to her friend): What's this literary criticism section? Is it for books that complain about other books?","author":"Jen Campbell","tags":["humour","literary-criticism"],"id":47210,"author_id":"Jen+Campbell"},{"text":"What are American dry-goods? Asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry.","author":"Oscar Wilde","tags":["american","bad-reviews","books","humor","literary-criticism","novels","sarcasm"],"id":48725,"author_id":"Oscar+Wilde"},{"text":"Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.","author":"Irwin Shaw","tags":["literary-criticism","new-york-city"],"id":56302,"author_id":"Irwin+Shaw"},{"text":"Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature but one's own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence.","author":"F.L. Lucas","tags":["criticism","literary-criticism","literature","taste"],"id":77033,"author_id":"F.L.+Lucas"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":71,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}