Literature: Difference between revisions
Content deleted Content added
→Quotes: A Channing quote sourced |
→Quotes: James Earl Jones |
||
Line 9:
<!-- alphabetical order on author surname -->
* I got a glimpse into the uses of a certain kind of [[criticism]] this past summer at a writers' conference – into how the avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D. I saw how it was possible to gain a chair of literature on no qualification other than persistence in nipping the heels of [[Ernest Hemingway|Hemingway]], [[William Faulkner|Faulkner]], and [[John Steinbeck|Steinbeck]].
** [[Nelson Algren]], [http://web.archive.org/web/20100926152002/http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4987/the-art-of-fiction-no-11-nelson-algren "The Art of Fiction No. 11: Nelson Algren"], Fall 1955 interview by Alston Anderson and {{w|Terry Southern}}, ''{{w|The Paris Review}}'', Winter 1955.
* Literature is one facet of a [[culture]]. The significance of a literature can be best understood in terms of the culture from which it springs, and the purpose of literature is clear only when the reader understands and accepts the assumptions on which the literature is based. A person who was raised in a given culture has no problem seeing the relevance, the level of [[complexity]], or the symbolic significance of that culture’s literature. We are all from early [[childhood]] familiar with the assumptions that underlie our own culture and its literature and art. Intelligent analysis becomes a matter of identifying smaller assumptions peculiar to the locale, idiom, and psyche of the writer.
** [[Paula Gunn Allen]], {{cite book |title=The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions |date=1 September 1992 |publisher=Beacon Press |isbn=978-0-8070-4617-3}} Chapter Two
* Literature must, of necessity, express and articulate the deepest [[Perception|perceptions]], [[Relationship|relationships]], and attitudes of a culture, whether it does so deliberately or accidentally.
** [[Paula Gunn Allen]], {{cite book |title=The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions |date=1 September 1992 |publisher=Beacon Press |isbn=978-0-8070-4617-3}} Chapter Two
* The question I propose to consider is in what way one may justify the study of [[English language|English]] on cultural and disciplinary, and not merely on [[sentimental]] or [[Utilitarianism|utilitarian]] grounds. My own conviction is that if English is to be thus justified it must be primarily by what I am terming the discipline of ideas.
: As a matter of fact one hears it commonly said nowadays that literature may be rescued from the philologist on the one hand and the mere dilettante on the other by an increase of emphasis on its intellectual content, that the teaching of literature, if it is to have virility, must be above all the teaching of ideas.
:* [[Irving Babbitt]], "English and the Discipline of Ideas " (1920), ''Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings'' (1981), p. 63
* Literature is the [[question]] minus the [[answer]].
** [[Roland Barthes]], as quoted by the AP Literature test, 2004
Line 37:
** Shoshana Felman, “Forms of Judicial Blindness: Traumatic Narratives and Legal Repetitions”, in Thomas R. Kearns (August 2002). [https://books.google.com/books?id=J_9YVh0QmUQC ''History, Memory, and the Law'']. University of Michigan Press. p.26
* Literature is [[Prophecy|prophetic]]-life often lives up to fiction
** [[Rosario Ferré]] "Preface: Memoir of Diamond Dust" in Sweet Diamond Dust: And Other Stories (1988)
Line 53:
** [[Anthony Hopkins]], ''[[w:Hearts in Atlantis (film)|Hearts in Atlantis]]'' (film), screenplay by [[w:William Goldman|William Goldman]]..
* It is to [[Roman Civilization|Rome]] and [[w:Roman_literature|Roman literature]] that we must turn to find the earliest examples of affectionate and confidential letters passing between members of the same [[family]], and between friends of the same tastes and sympathies.
** [[Augustus Jessopp]]: {{cite book|chapter=Letters and letter-writers|title=Studies by a recluse, in cloister, town, and country|edition=3rd|location=London|publisher=T. F. Unwin|pages=215–257|chapter-url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015022733243&view=1up&seq=247}} quote from p. 221; (1st edition, 1892)
Line 59:
** [[Alejandro Jodorowsky]], ''Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy'', (2010)
* When I read great literature, great [[drama]], [[speeches]], or [[Sermon|sermons]], I feel that the [[human]] [[mind]] has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share [[feelings]] and [[Thought|thoughts]] through [[language]].
* The second essay, by Dominick LaCapra, also takes up the theme of repetition as it asks what makes a legal trial worth remembering. Focusing on the nineteenth-century trials of [[Flaubert]] and [[Baudelaire]] for “outrage to public and religious morality and to good morals,” LaCapra demonstrates that the aesthetic standard used to judge these writers demanded that a work of art provide “purely symbolic and ‘spiritual’ resolution of the problems it explored.” Flaubert and Baudelaire were, in essence, subject to criminal prosecution for their commitment to literary realism that led them to flour some of the representational taboos of their time. <br> Yet in LaCapra’s view their trials were not, in a strict sense, show trials whose purpose was to instill a broad, collective memory. They were not designed to recall from the past events that “insistently made demands on collective and individual remembrance and thus necessitated entry into the public sphere.” They were instead intended to create a memory of the consequences that would attach to writers who transgressed public norms and whose “deviant” work might have a broad public impact. LaCapra worries about the use of law for such memorial purposes, and he notes the continuing controversy over whether histiography has the function of transmitting memory. In his own view history has two related objectives, namely the adjudication of truth claims about the past and the transmission of memory. <br> It is, however, the memory of the criminal trial, especially those in which literature is put on trial, to which LaCapra calls out attention. Such trials raise questions about how literary texts can be read in particular contexts, and they call on us to remember the situatedness and contingency of all readings. When faced with literary texts that are in some sense transgressive, law, LaCapra suggests, will read through the lens of its own reconstructions of the past-through precedent-and, as a result, will read in a regulative, normalizing way. Law will seek to protect the literary canon and repress the more disconcerting features of literature in order to make it a vehicle for the promotion of conventional social values. Yet this kind of reading, a reading that serves to commemorate convention, defeats literature. LaCapra calls for a kind of literary privilege in which what the law may justifiably prohibit in social life should not be prohibited in art or literature. Art could thus serve society as a safe haven for exploration and experimentation.▼
** [[James Earl Jones]], 'Voices and Silences '' (1993) co-written with Penelope Niven; also 2nd edition ''Voices and Silences: With a New Epilogue'' (2002) p. 373''
▲* The second essay, by Dominick LaCapra, also takes up the theme of [[repetition]] as it asks what makes a legal trial worth remembering. Focusing on the [[19th century|nineteenth-century]] trials of [[Flaubert]] and [[Baudelaire]] for “outrage to public and religious [[morality]] and to good morals,” LaCapra demonstrates that the [[Aesthetics|aesthetic]] standard used to judge these writers demanded that a work of art provide “purely symbolic and ‘spiritual’ resolution of the problems it explored.” Flaubert and Baudelaire were, in essence, subject to criminal prosecution for their commitment to literary realism that led them to flour some of the representational taboos of their time. <br> Yet in LaCapra’s view their trials were not, in a strict sense, show trials whose purpose was to instill a broad, collective memory. They were not designed to recall from the past events that “insistently made demands on collective and individual remembrance and thus necessitated entry into the public sphere.” They were instead intended to create a memory of the consequences that would attach to writers who transgressed public norms and whose “deviant” work might have a broad public impact. LaCapra worries about the use of law for such memorial purposes, and he notes the continuing controversy over whether histiography has the function of transmitting memory. In his own view history has two related objectives, namely the adjudication of truth claims about the past and the transmission of memory. <br> It is, however, the memory of the criminal trial, especially those in which literature is put on trial, to which LaCapra calls out attention. Such trials raise questions about how literary texts can be read in particular contexts, and they call on us to remember the situatedness and contingency of all readings. When faced with literary texts that are in some sense transgressive, law, LaCapra suggests, will read through the lens of its own reconstructions of the past-through precedent-and, as a result, will read in a regulative, normalizing way. Law will seek to protect the literary canon and repress the more disconcerting features of literature in order to make it a vehicle for the promotion of conventional social values. Yet this kind of reading, a reading that serves to commemorate convention, defeats literature. LaCapra calls for a kind of literary privilege in which what the law may justifiably prohibit in social life should not be prohibited in art or literature. Art could thus serve society as a safe haven for exploration and experimentation.
** Thomas R. Kearns (August 2002). [https://books.google.com/books?id=J_9YVh0QmUQC ''History, Memory, and the Law'']. University of Michigan Press. pp.16-17
Line 84 ⟶ 87:
** [[Molière]], ''Le Mariage forcé'', scene 6 (1664).
* Many [[psychologists]] have treated literature as a whole as a mere vehicle of withdrawal from the harsh realities of existence: forgetful of the fact that literature of the first order, so far from being a mere pleasure device, is a supreme attempt to face and encompass reality-an attempt beside which a busy working life involves a shrinkage and represents a partial retreat.
** [[Lewis Mumford]], ''Technics and Civilization'' (1934), Chapter 6, § 9, p. 314-315
Line 99 ⟶ 102:
** [[Ezra Pound]], ''ABC of Reading'' (1934), Ch. 8
* In all the good [[Greek language|Greek]] of [[Plato]]<br>I lack my [[Roast beef|roastbeef]] and [[w:Potato|potato]].{{pb}}A better man was [[Aristotle]],<br>Pulling steady on the bottle.{{pb}} I dip my hat to [[Chaucer]],<br>Swilling [[soup]] from his saucer,{{pb}}And to Master [[Shakespeare]]<br>Who wrote big on small [[beer]].{{pb}}The abstemious [[William Wordsworth|Wordsworth]]<br>Subsisted on a curd’s-worth,{{pb}}But a slick one was [[Alfred, Lord Tennyson|Tennyson]],<br>Putting [[w:Gravy|gravy]] on his [[w:Venison|venison]].{{pb}}What these men had to [[Eating|eat]] and [[drink]]<br>Is what we say and what we [[think]].{{pb}}The influence of [[John Milton|Milton]]<br>Came wry out of [[Cheese|Stilton]].{{pb}}Sing a song for [[Percy Shelley]],<br>Drowned in pale lemon jelly,{{pb}}And for precious [[John Keats]],<br>Dripping [[blood]] of pickled [[w:Beets|beets]].{{pb}}Then there was poor [[William Blake|Willie Blake]],<br>He foundered on sweet cake.{{pb}}God have mercy on the [[sinner]]<br>Who must write with no [[dinner]],{{pb}}No gravy and no grub,<br>No pewter and no pub,{{pb}}No belly and no bowels,<br>Only consonants and vowels.
** John Crowe Ransom, "Survey of Literature"
Line 111 ⟶ 114:
** [[Simone Weil]], “Morality and literature,” ''On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God'', R. Rees, trans. (1968), p. 164.
* The invention of [[printing]] added a new element of [[power]] to the [[race]]. From that hour, in a most especial sense, the [[brain]] and not the arm, the thinker and not the [[Soldiers|soldier]], [[books]] and not [[King|kings]], were to rule the world; and [[Weapon|Weapons]] forged in the mind, keen-edged, and brighter than the sunbeam, were to supplant the [[sword]] and [[battle-axe]]. […] Books,—lighthouses erected in the great sea of time,—books, the precious depositories of the thoughts and creations of genius,—books, by whose [[Magic (supernatural)|sorcery]] times past become [[time]] present, and the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before our eyes;—these were to visit the firesides of the humble, and lavish the treasures of the intellect upon the poor. Could we have Plato, and Shakespeare, and Milton, in our dwellings, in the full vigor of their [[Imagination|imaginations]], in the full freshness of their hearts, few scholars would be affluent enough to afford them physical support; but the living images of their minds are within the eyes of all. From their pages their mighty souls look out upon us in all their grandeur and beauty, undimmed by the faults and follies of earthly existence, consecrated by time.
** [[Edwin Percy Whipple]], ''Literature and Life'' (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850), pp. 36–38..
Line 117 ⟶ 120:
:<small>Quotes reported in ''[[Wikisource:Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)|Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations]]'' (1922), p. 461.</small>
* Literature is the thought of thinking [[Soul|Souls]].
** [[Thomas Carlyle]], ''Essays'', ''Memoirs of the Life of Scott''.
* Literary Men are * * * a perpetual [[priesthood]].
** [[Thomas Carlyle]], ''Essays'', ''State of German Literature''.
Line 126 ⟶ 129:
** [[Charles Dickens]], speech at Liverpool Banquet (1869).
* But, indeed, we prefer books to pounds; and we love manuscripts better than florins; and we prefer small pamphlets to war [[horses]].
** [[Isaac D'Israeli]], ''Curiosities of Literature'', ''Pamphlets''.
Line 144 ⟶ 147:
** [[Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay]], ''On Sir William Temple''.
* There is first the literature of [[knowledge]], and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is—to teach; the function of the second is—to move, the first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy.
** [[Thomas De Quincey]], ''Essays on the Poets'', ''Alexander Pope''.
* ''La mode d'aimer Racine passera comme la mode du café.''
** The fashion of liking Racine will pass away like that of [[coffee]].
** [[Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné]], according to Voltaire, Letters (Jan. 29, 1690), who connected two remarks of hers to make the phrase; one from a letter March 16, 1679, the other, March 10, 1672. La Harpe reduced the mot to "Racine passera comme le café?"
| |||