#criticism

Don't criticize what you can't understand. ↗

— Bob Dylan

#criticism #song-lyrics #understanding

It isn't deep," the Eddisian Ambassador said from the other side of the bed. He was leaning over the wound, looking critical and mildly disappointed. Eugenides didn't miss a beat. "It is...too...deep!" he insisted, outraged. ↗

— Megan Whalen Turner

#criticism

Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap. ↗

— China Miéville

#genres #literary-criticism #pulp #criticism

I criticize by creation, not by finding fault. ↗

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

#creativity #criticism #wisdom #wisdom-quote #wise

Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible. ↗

— Bart D. Ehrman

#bible #criticism #literature #skepticism #atheism

Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form. ↗

— Stendhal

#novels #satire #social-criticism #satire

What the hell is 'novelistic' sweep? Real people don't use words like that. 'Today's sukiyaki was lacking in beefistic sweep.' (from Honey Pie) ↗

— huruki murakami

#writing #literary-criticism

A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#education #literary-theory #reading #education

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

Literary Fiction and Reality Towards the beginning of his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil announces that 'no serious attempt will be made to... enter into competition with reality.' And yet it is an element in the situation he cannot ignore. How good it would be, he suggests, if one could find in life ' the simplicity inherent in narrative order. 'This is the simple order that consists in being able to say: "When that had happened, then this happened." What puts our mind at rest is the simple sequence, the overwhelming variegation of life now represented in, as a mathematician would say, a unidimensional order.' We like the illusions of this sequence, its acceptable appearance of causality: 'it has the look of necessity.' But the look is illusory; Musil's hero Ulrich has 'lost this elementary narrative element' and so has Musil. The Man Without Qualities is multidimensional, fragmentary, without the possibility of a narrative end. Why could he not have his narrative order? Because 'everything has now become nonnarrative.' The illusion would be too gross and absurd. Musil belonged to the great epoch of experiment; after Joyce and Proust, though perhaps a long way after, he is the novelist of early modernism. And as you see he was prepared to spend most of his life struggling with the problems created by the divergence of comfortable story and the non-narrative contingencies of modern reality. Even in the earlier stories he concerned himself with this disagreeable but necessary dissociation; in his big novel he tries to create a new genre in which, by all manner of dazzling devices and metaphors and stratagems, fiction and reality can be brought together again. He fails; but the point is that he had to try, a sceptic to the point of mysticism and caught in a world in which, as one of his early characters notices, no curtain descends to conceal 'the bleak matter-of-factness of things. ↗

— Frank Kermode

#experience