Don't read with your eyes.
T here’s no written rule anywhere that I know of stating this, no First-teenth Amendment to the Literary Constitution, but there might as well be: you get one national poet.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden
Going After Cacciato
Everywhere you look, the ground is already camped on. So you sigh and pitch your tent where you can, knowing someone else has been there before.
Education is mostly about institutions and getting tickets stamped; learning is what we do for ourselves. When we're lucky, they go together. If I had to choose, I'd take learning.
And we feel that those characters couldn't be anywhere but where they are, that those characters couldn't say the things they say if they were uprooted and planted in, say, Minnesota or Scotland.
So what did you think the devil would look like? If he were red with a tail, horns, and cloven hooves, any fool could say no.
Ishmael Reed
In a sense, every story or poem is a vacation.
Characters as rich and complex as those we believe ourselves to be
The process of dehuminazing the locals was under way, and it had very little to do with veracity. The Puritan narratives would continue that process and bring the devil into the mix. At least John Smi...
Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time?
There is, in fact, no form of dysfunctional family or no personal disintegration of character for which there is not a Greek or Roman model.
Professors also read, and think, symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.