#critic

It was a time of beautiful brutal illusions. ↗

— Mick Karabegovic

#non-fiction #true-life-story #beauty

Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook. ↗

— Stuart Hall

#cultural-studies #intellectualism #theory #change

Recognising such dimensions implicit to the reading experience can distract from the immediacy of our response; it can substitute literary archaeology for novelistic reality. That is one pole. But the other extreme is equally limiting. By failing to realise the issues involved in communicating with fictional modes that are different to our own, in effect we do not read in the fullest sense. Between intellectual pedantry and cultivated ignorance I would pose a third approach to reading—that of the informed imagination. After occupying this position true evaluation can begin. ↗

— Ian Gregor

#communication

Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation--who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him--but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope--qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning. ↗

— Bill Styron

#fiction #fiction-writing #paris-review #equality

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then ↗

— Alison Bechdel

#literary-criticism #university #experience

The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them. ↗

— Joseph Heller

#freedom #freedom-of-thought #independence #freedom

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes. ↗

— Steve Martin

#empathy #funny #humor #funny

Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better. ↗

— Stephen Potter

#criticism #humor #writing #humor

I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. ... Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path. ↗

— Nick Hornby

#freebies #planning #president #reading #reading-lists

As we have seen, French culture and language interacted with native English culture for several generations after the Norman Conquest. A common word such as 'castle' is a French loan word, for example; and the whole romance tradition comes from the French. But this sensibility, culture, and language becomes integrated with native culture. As well as the beginnings of what came to be called a courtly love tradition, we can find in Early Middle English (around the time that Layamon was writing Brut) the growth of a local tradition of songs and ballads. ↗

— Ronald Carter

#love