Literary Theories Quotes

The 1980s: feminism, postmodernism, sexual/textual politics

While it might be tempting to generalise that Woolf 's writing was being discussed almost in two separate camps during the 1980s, formalists on the one hand, and feminists on the other, this would be to simplify things too far.
Many critics were attempting to make sense of and connect her feminist politics with her modernist practices. Such investigations coincided with the explosion of theory in literary studies, and once again the work of Virginia
Woolf was central to the framing of many of the major theoretical developments in literary critical engagements with feminism, postmodernism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. In the context of the rise of 'high theory'
and the questioning of old-school Marxist, materialist, humanist and historicist literary theories, Woolf studies wrestled with the locating of her radical feminist politics in the avant-garde qualities of the text itself, and its endlessly transgressive play of signifiers, with the Woolfian inscription of radically deconstructed models of the self and of sexuality and jouissance. ~ Jane Goldman

Literary theories will not make a writer write. ~ Allen Wier

From a letter to Barrett H.Clark, 4 May 1918(LL,II,pp.204-5):
my attitude to subjects and expressions, the angles of vision, my methods of composition will, within limits, be always changing
not because I am unstable or unpricipled but because I am free. Or perhaps it may be more exact to say, because I am always trying for freedom
within my limits ... A work of art is seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character. ~ Joseph Conrad

Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation.The only legitimate of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous
so full of hope. They exist! And this is the only fundamental truth of fiction. ~ Joseph Conrad

If it be true that every novel contains an element of autobiography - and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only express himself in his creation - then there are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant. ~ Joseph Conrad

--From "A Familiar Preface", 1912(PR,pp,19-20）：
"At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things;but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. ~ Joseph Conrad

Theory A widely accepted hypothesis that stands the test of time. Theories are often tested, and usually not rejected. ~ Jean Brainard

Theories are a fluid road map for solving a mystery and, if broached with an open mind and scrupulous attention to detail, they grant the answers you seek. ~ Karen Marie Moning

The Restoration did not so much restore as replace. In restoring the monarchy with King Charles II, it replaced Cromwell's Commonwealth and its Puritan ethos with an almost powerless monarch whose tastes had been formed in France.

It replaced the power of the monarchy with the power of a parliamentary system - which was to develop into the two parties, Whigs and Tories - with most of the executive power in the hands of the Prime Minister. Both parties benefited from a system which encouraged social stability rather than opposition.
Above all, in systems of thought, the Restoration replaced the probing, exploring, risk-taking intellectual values of the Renaissance. It relied on reason and on facts rather than on speculation. So, in the decades between 1660 and 1700, the basis was set for the growth of a new kind of society. This society was Protestant (apart from the brief reign of the Catholic King James II, 1685-88), middle class, and unthreatened by any repetition of the huge and traumatic upheavals of the first part of the seventeenth century. It is symptomatic that the overthrow of James II in 1688 was called The 'Glorious' or 'Bloodless' Revolution. The 'fever in the blood' which the Renaissance had allowed was now to be contained, subject to reason, and kept under control. With only the brief outburst of Jacobin revolutionary sentiment at the time of the Romantic poets, this was to be the political context in the United Kingdom for two centuries or more. ~ Ronald Carter

There are ultimate truths you cannot hide from no matter how high you climb or how long you sit alone. Everything is on its way somewhere, even if that place feels like nowhere. ~ LeighLa Graham

A man was leaning idly against an elm ... The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer. ~ Matthew Pearl

Knowledge advances as much through negative results and thwarted hypotheses as it does by theories that prove to be correct. ~ Sue Armstrong

Maybe by the time they were in their Silver Year, Master Rufus would communicate complicated theories of magic by the lifting of a single bushy eyebrow. ~ Cassandra Clare

There are plenty of theories to listen to and follow but truth yearns to be discovered. When you find it, there is no doubt where to go. ~ E'yen A. Gardner

He nodded, looking across the room at the sea of photographers and journalists. The microphones spread around him like birds waiting to be fed. ~ F.C. Malby

I am an author of the analytical critique. And because of that, a ton of research is done by me in order to bring an examination into comprehensive being. ("Interviews With Writers," 2018). ~ Cat Ellington

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's. ~ Aldous Huxley

The social and political history of Europe would be what it has been if Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart, et al., had never lived. A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over. By all means, let a poet, if he wants to, write what is now called an "engagé" poem, so long as he realizes that it is mainly himself who will benefit from it. It will enhance his literary reputation among those who feel the same as he does. ~ W.H. Auden

When they ask me why I jumped off the roof of my brother's apartment building, I will tell them it was because I wanted the sky to mourn me.

And because I wanted to know what it feels like to hit something so hard it shatters me into bits that they can never sew back together. ~ Kady Hunt

American literature has, since the time of the Puritans, featured the jeremiad as a prolonged complaint, a prophet's indictment of his society characteristic of work such as the muckrakers' novels or Allan Ginsberg's "Howl." Doctorow struggles to accommodate this form to his artistry (as successful practitioners of the work have always done). To this end, he has repeatedly adapted genres such as the Western, the romance, and the detective novel, often playing with accepted conventions, and thus avoiding didacticism. ~ Michelle M. Tokarczyk

...[T]hese people... are my dangerous accusers; because those who hear them suppose that anyone who inquires into such matters... theories about the heavens... and everything below the earth... must be an atheist. ~ Socrates

And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute. ~ Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty. ~ George W. Bush

I bet it was also the triumphant Aha! and not the truth itself that had fueled all those famous literary detectives I knew not much about except their names - Philip Marlowe, Sherlock Holmes, Joe and Frank Hardy. I felt like yelling something celebratory on my way home, something like, Yeah! or Fuck, yeah! just like Marlowe would have yelled, just like the Hardys would have yelled, and maybe Holmes, too, although maybe that's why he kept Watson around; to tell Holmes to simmer down and not get too far ahead of himself. ~ Brock Clarke

Civilization is built by the artist, by the literary exponent, by the ability to generate beauty and music and new methods of expression. ~ Irshad Manji

We seek to sow life in the child rather than theories, to help him in his growth, mental and emotional as well as physical, and for that we must offer grand and lofty ideas to the human mind, ~ Maria Montessori

Historically speaking all - or very nearly all - scientific theories originate from myths. ~ Karl Popper

A great number of elements in the characters' lives, both psychic and factual, are not communicated to us. [ ... ] These characters, I believe, enjoy a much greater autonomy than we usually think, and are able to take initiatives unknown both to the writer and the reader. When characters have their own will, their own autonomy, it gives the literary universe a greater internal mobility; it also makes the texts through which we view this world all the more open and incomplete. ~ Pierre Bayard

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. ~ Aldous Huxley

I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing authors and reviews, I sit on committees with capable practical greengrocers and bootmakers ... Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Proven conspiracies very often involve a banality and institutional disorganization that is conspicuously missing from the average conspiracy theory, in which countless numbers of conspirators from multiple organizations are able to march in evil lockstep ad infinitum. ~ Chris Fleming

The average, vague understanding of being can be permeated by traditional theories and opinions about being in such a way that these theories, as the sources of the prevailing understanding, remain hidden. ~ Martin Heidegger

Books lay on the floor in literary dunes. ~ Chris Columbus

If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing does introduce an important new element, and one that remains significant. He has often been called 'the spokesman of despair,' and this is true in both meanings of the phrase. Like Kingsley and Mrs Gaskell, he writes to describe the true conditions of the poor, and to protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world. Yet he is also the spokesman of another kind of despair: the despair born of social and political disillusion. In this he is a figure exactly like Orwell in our own day, and for much the same reason. Whether one calls this honesty or not will depend on experience. ~ Raymond Williams

According to old frineds who grew up with Stanley Ann Dunham, she became a serious student of Communist and Marxist theories back in high school. One profile even named a few of her radical teachers and administrators at Mercer High, which Dunham attended, whose classrooms formed part of what was called "anarchy alley." What sounds strange is that this avante-garde, supposedly idealistic communist-thinking student of the left met a major oil company executive during the radical 1960s, and not only found him not to be a repulsively evil money-grubbing capitalist pig, but was so taken in by his Big Oil company/military charm that she married him.
Okay, so maybe that's not coincidence. Maybe that's just the power of love. ~ Mondo Frazier

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

In the analysis of books, as in the analysis of complex world events, we hover between two kinds of error: ascribing too much meaning where there is little, if any, to be found, and ignoring meaning that stares us right in the face. ~ J.C. Hallman

I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy's screwy - cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad. ~ Zadie Smith

We have a curious relationship with 'funny' in the U.K. We love to laugh, but we also think that making people laugh is just a little bit second-tier, especially in a literary context. ~ Nick Harkaway

The Stetson passage is an allusion to Frazer theory in The Golden Bough that religion originated as agricultural engineering. Through a grotesque process of literalization, all of the dying gods and heroes in The Golden Bough, along with Christ and the Fisher King, are transferred from mythic to modern consciousness ( Frazer himself was an unabashed positivist) to be made explicable in scientific terms as fertilizer. ~ Jewel Spears Brooker

The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves? ~ Steven Pinker

I remember classes in college where the professor was espousing certain theories about how blacks were inherently less intelligent. But I learned a long time ago to give people the benefit of the doubt, not to assume that somebody was reacting to you because of race. ~ Condoleezza Rice

Theories pass. The frog remains. ~ Jean Rostand

I write literary biographies, so above all, I have to love the subject's books. But choosing a subject is tough. ~ Blake Bailey

That's the thing about theories. You can theorize what you want, but at the end of the day when your theories become reality, when the situation you have theorized about is suddenly presented to you, your theories go flying out the windowز ~ Jane Green

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide. ~ Erma Bombeck

The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted…Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature…we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. [Final passage in "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, by Roland Barthes, Trans. Stephen Heath (1977)] ~ Roland Barthes

Blogging has helped create an expanded awareness of the creative nonfiction genre, generally. But I suspect many bloggers continue to be unaware that they are (or have the potential to be) "literary" or "artful." ~ Lee Gutkind

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar. ~ Carolyn G. Heilbrun

What indeed is madness but the orgasm between consciousness and unconsciousness; yet today psychology has passed this chaotic union between mind and soul: it is taking form, and one day it will be brought to the bed of a new priesthood. Already have the heralds of the last illusion blazoned forth the coming of the magicians. Freud and Jung and a host of followers have invented psycho-analysis, which today is still pure black magic, the anatomization of the mind by thought potientized by theories in place of panticles, mantras and spells. ~ J. F. C. Fuller

I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book. ~ William Styron