Quotes on Literature
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Dr. Bordelon's The Short Story: On Campus |
Ruminations on the Word On the prevalence and importance of literature from Profession 2003 “Though our culture is saturated with fictions and cunningly contrived lyrics and artful images, though people's fantasies are wholly colonized by writers whose names these people may have never heard of, though the riders of subways and planes have their noses in books, though the most intense moments of anger or passion are unconsciously scripted by novels and screenplays, [. . . most people believe] that the humanities played no role at all in the lives” (Greenblatt 8). “most Americans in a society that sometimes seems as caught up as Bali in the making and consuming of art, still do not begin to recognize the absolute centrality of literature and language in their lives. Perhaps this unawareness is part of the cunning of our culture” (Greenblatt 8). Burke, Kenneth. “Literature as Equipment for Living.” Contemporary Literary Criticism . Ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. New York: Longman, 1989. 75-81. Sociological critics “consider works of art, I think, as strategies for selecting enemies, and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another. Art forms like ‘tragedy' or ‘comedy' or ‘satire' would be treated as equipments for living , that size up situations in various ways and in keeping with correspondingly various attitudes” (Burke 81) Aristotle “the poet's [writer's] function is not to report things that have happened, but rather to tell of such things as might happen, things that are possibilities by virtue of being in themselves inevitable or probable [. . . .] Poetry [fiction], therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history, in that poetry tends rather to express the universal, history rather the particular fact.” from Poetics Henry David Thoreau “For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thought of man?” “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.” “To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” Italo Calvino "A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum." On Words Ludwig Wittgenstein “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Tim O'Brien What I do for a living is try to make decent sentences, caring about commas and caring about the difference between a proper and a regular noun. . . .What I think about on a daily basis is language, trying to put sentences down that I can live with. As writers, all we have [is] language and nothing else. We've got these 26 letters of the alphabet and some punctuation marks -- that's it. And out of those 26 letters you can make Ulysses or you can make Cosmo . You can make pure crap or you can make great art. -- Tim O'Brien From the Cornell Chronicle On Fiction Joseph Conrad on the purpose of the writer and on the power of fiction: "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see . That – and no more, and it is everything" (225). "Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting – on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth" (231). Conrad, Joseph. "Conrad on Life and Art." Heart of Darkness. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton, 1988. 218-235. Walt Whitman , in a late essay entitled "An Old Man's Rejoinder" argues that context is essential to understanding any work of art: "No great poem or other literary or artistic work of any scope, old or new, can be essentially consider'd without weighing first the age, politics (or want of politics) and aim, visible forms, unseen soul, and current times, out of the midst of which it rises and is formulated" (1249) Franz Kafka in an 1904 letter to Oskar Pollak "I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe." Tim O'Brien “One of the reasons that I write (and one of the goals of literature in general) is to jar people into looking at important things. Much of our lives is spent thinking about clothing ourselves and our families and feeding ourselves and so on, so that we rarely try to grapple with philosophical issues. A good novel will seduce you into caring about those things – maybe only temporarily – but for the three hours it takes to read [. . .], you have to pay attention to that stuff because that's what the book's about” (qtd. in Schroder 137) Schroder, Eric James. Vietnam: We've All Been There . Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1992. Negative Capability – on being comfortable with uncertainty John Keats ". . . it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously -- I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. . . . This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. From a letter to his brothers George and Thomas (1817) Gustave Flaubert "Superficial, limited creatures, rash, feather-brained souls, demand a conclusion from everything; they want to know the purpose of life and the dimensions of the infinite. Picking up a handful of sand in their poor, puny grasp, they way to the Ocean: 'I shall now count the grains on your shores.' But when the sand slips through their fingers and the sum proves long, they stamp and burst into tears. Do you know what we should do on that shore? Either kneel down or walk. You must walk. No great genius has come to final conclusions; no great book ever does so, because humanity itself is forever on the march and can arrive at not goal" From a letter Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie (1857) Andre Dubus “Wanting to know absolutely what a story is about and to be able to say in a few sentences is dangerous: it can lead us to wanting to possess a story as we possess a cup. We know the function of cup, and we drink from it, wash it, put it on a shelf, and it remains a thing we own and control, unless it slips from our hands into the control of gravity; or unless someone else breaks it, or uses it to give us poisoned tea. A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth“ (49). Dubus, Andrew. “A Hemingway Story.” Meditations from a Movable Chair . New York: Vintage, 1998. 45-58. On Poetry Parini, Jay. "The Bog Poet." Rev. of Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 . The Nation 4 January 1999: 25-28. _______________________________________
to get the news from poems
of what is found there William Carlos Williams From “Of Asphodel, That Green Flower” Samuel Jonson Being now resoved to be a poet, I saw everything with a new purpose; my sphere of attention was suddenly magnified; no kind of knowledge was to be overlooked. To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful, and whatever is dreadful, must be familiar to his imagination; he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little. Rasselas On Critics Henry Fielding Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are. From this complaisance the critics have been emboldened to assume a dictatorial power, and have so far succeeded that they are now become the masters and have the assurance to give laws to those authors from whose predecessors they originally received them. The critic, rightly considered, is no more than the clerk, whose office it is to transcribe the rules and laws laid down by those great judges whose vast strength of genius hath placed them in the light of legislators in the several sciences over which they presided. This office was all which the critics of old aspired to, nor did they ever dare to advance a sentence without supporting it by the authority of the judge from whence it was borrowed. But in the process of time, and in ages of ignorance, the clerk began to invade the power and assume the dignity of his master. The laws of writing were no longer founded on the practice of the author but on the dictates of the critic. The clerk became the legislator, and those very peremptorily gave laws whose business it was at first only to transcribe them. © 2008 David Bordelon
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