theoryliterary

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What your favorite book looks like without the words: With his project Between the Words, Nicholas Rougeux created beautiful posters displaying only the punctuation from well-known books.  

via        

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Literature has to do with the experience of limits: it probes, delves, tests what is sayable and what it is not possible to say.

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Studying Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (2015).

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The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Oscar Wilde

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They were recreations. All literature is.

Norman Holmes Pearson’s introduction to H.D.’s Tribute to Freud. 

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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Sometimes literature is a bulwark of the establishment. Sometimes it gets the establishment's goat.

Margaret Anne Doody, Is Literature Dead?, PMLA, vol. 115, no. 5 (2000).

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“Reading is one of the few distinctively human activities that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. As many scholars have noted, and [Annie Murphy] Paul too mentions in her piece, reading, unlike spoken language, does not come naturally to human beings. It must be taught. Because it goes beyond mere biology, there is something profoundly spiritual -- however one understands that word -- about the human ability, and impulse, to read. In fact, even the various senses in which we use the word captures this: to "read" means not only to decipher a given and learned set of symbols in a mechanistic way, but it also suggests that very human act of finding meaning, of "interpreting" in the sense of "reading" a person or situation. To read in this sense might be considered one of the most spiritual of all human activities.” - Karen Swallow Prior (The Atlantic - June 21, 2013)

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There is no friend as loyal as a book

Ernest Hemingway 

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It is sheer ingratitude for the learned to disparage poetry when poets were the first purveyors of knowledge, 'their Fathers in learning'. Philosophers such as Plato and historians such as Herodotus exploited the imaginative techniques of the poet as their 'passport' to the public ear. For the Romans the poet (vates) was a 'prophet', a role to be taken seriously if one reflects on the psalms of David. For the Greeks the poet was a 'maker'. And indeed the poet is not tied in subjection to what the world of Nature supplies, but outdoes what Nature does in what his imagination creates.

Harry Blamires, A History of Literary Criticism (Macmillan, 1991).

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Those who tell the stories rule society.

Plato 

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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means…

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

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I’m reading ‘The Western Canon’ (Riverhead Books, 1994).

All canons are elitist.  If you hate canons, you are elitist.  

- Harold Bloom’s logic.

(Bloom 1994, p. 35; p. 31).

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The First Cut.  Jacqueline Rush Lee 2015

Transformed Harvard Loeb Library Translation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”

H7.75″ x W5.5″ x D6.5.″  Photo: Paul Kodama

One of two works commissioned by Robert Bolick, curator of Books on Books.

The Metamorphoses is Ovid’s epic poem about “bodies which have been transformed into shapes of different kinds.” With motifs of violence, punishment, reward, pathos, and lost speech dwelling within this classic tale, Ovid writes about human feelings in the face of the awful and the tender, the terrifying and beautiful, the violent and loving.

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“Critics also protest that literary theory ‘gets in between the reader and the work’… Without some kind of theory, however unreflective and implicit, we would not know what a 'literary work’ was in the first place, or how we were to read it. Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people’s theories and an oblivion of one’s own.”

Terry Eagleton, Preface to Literary Theory (2008)