How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Row...
We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.
Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.
Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.
Frye’s influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithy...
For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything.
All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.
We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies and all the sorrows of...
Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.
Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.
No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.
What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.
Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.
Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.
The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a...
The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William.
Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about...