Literary Criticism Quotes - Page 3

• The techniques are all means of dealing with one simple idea: She wrote it. (That is, the "wrong" person--in this case, female--has created the "right" value--i.e., art.)
  Denial of Agency: She didn't write it.
  Pollution of Agency: She shouldn't have written it.
  Double Standard of Content: Yes, but look what she wrote about.
  False Categorizing: She is not really she [an artist] and it is not really it [serious, of the right genre, aesthetically sound, important, etc.] so how could "she" have written "it"?
  Or simply: Neither "she" nor "it" exists (simple exclusion).

  Joanna Russ

  Art, Mean, Writing

  Joanna Russ (1983). “How to Suppress Women's Writing”, p.61, University of Texas Press

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• Criticism even should not be without its charms. When quite devoid of all amenities, it is no longer literary.

  Joseph Joubert

  Criticism, Charm, Should

  Joseph Joubert (1896). “Pensées of Joubert”

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• There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word "banal" sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say "underedited," I say "derivative." The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.

  Anna Quindlen

  New York, Party, Moving

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• With a few exceptions, the critics of children's books are remarkably lenient souls.... Most of us assume there is something goodin every child; the critics go from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory.

  Katharine Sergeant Angell White

  Children, Book, Soul

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• Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by many hands in different ages.

  Bill Vaughan

  Bible, Book, Taken

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• If you're, like, a PhD student in English, and you look at each instance that Richard Yates is mentioned in the book...it has sort of it's own narrative that one could analyze and write literary criticism about.

  Tao Lin

  Book, Writing, Criticism

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• So-called "natural language" is wonderful for the purposes it was created for, such as to be rude in, to tell jokes in, to cheat or to make love in (and Theorists of Literary Criticism can even be content-free in it), but it is hopelessly inadequate when we have to deal unambiguously with situations of great intricacy, situations which unavoidably arise in such activities as legislation, arbitration, mathematics or programming.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Rude, Making Love, Criticism

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• Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary studies have been slow to wake up to the importance of MSA (media-specific analysis). Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view.

  N. Katherine Hayles

  Views, Media, Years

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• My literary criticism has become less specifically academic. I was really writing literary history in The New Poetic, but my general practice of writing literary criticism is pretty much what it always has been. And there has always been a strong connection between being a writer - I feel as though I know what it feels like inside and I can say I've experienced similar problems and solutions from the inside. And I think that's a great advantage as a critic, because you know what the writer is feeling.

  Christian Karlson Stead

  Strong, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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