Top 35 Quotes About Literary Theory
#1. She wouldn't disapprove of people who gave up philosophy or literary theory to do ordinary things." "Maybe not," mused Maggie. "If we eat pies, then we should never, not for one moment, look down on the making of them.
Alexander McCall Smith
#2. The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.
Charles Simic
#3. I'm not that well-versed in literary theory - I don't know what it is.
Jim Crace
#4. When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.
Ira Glass
#5. Inez and I had been in the same book club for a while. She once told me that literary theory was reading without imagination, and I've loved her ever since.
John Dufresne
#6. First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.
Mason Cooley
#7. I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '
Lev Grossman
#8. I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller.
Terry Eagleton
#9. Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.
Gore Vidal
#10. Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.
Terry Eagleton
#11. Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.
Nancy Pearcey
#12. I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.
Harry Frankfurt
#13. I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.
A.S. Byatt
#14. Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet's glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because
Virginia Heffernan
#15. A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.
C.S. Lewis
#16. We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there's that SCI-FI shit.
Hal Duncan
#18. Literary theories will not make a writer write.
Allen Wier
#19. Favoring 'resolution' the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren't satisfied unless at the end of the story the characters are lying there, panting.
Roman Payne
#20. The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#21. If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
Terry Eagleton
#22. Punctuation was, it is sad to say, invented a very long time ago. Even more frustrating, it has remained with us ever since.
Anne Elizabeth Moore
#25. Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science departments.
Siri Hustvedt
#26. Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
Roland Barthes
#27. The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing. [p.211]
Northrop Frye
#28. The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics.
C.S. Lewis
#29. The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]
Northrop Frye
#30. A linguistically informed literary criticism is the key to resolving conflict and frustration, from psychotherapy and law to philosophy and politics. Call this the messianic theory. It is based on the idea that TO THINK IS TO GRASP A METAPHOR-the metaphor metaphor.
Steven Pinker
#31. When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature
Tzvetan Todorov
#32. For me, fantasy must be about something, otherwise it's foolishness... ultimately it must be about human beings, it must be about the human condition, it must be another look at infinity, it must be another way of seeing the paradox of existence.
George Clayton Johnson
#33. It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
George Orwell
#34. In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.
Terry Pratchett
#35. It was only much later that he was made flesh and blood [in the Gospels] on paper. Thus Christ was created as a literary creation.
Paul Louis Couchoud
