11 quotes
Literature is most social when it is least social.
Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)
Periodization is the disciplinary strategy with which the present establishes its rule over all time and encourages conformism, to the detriment of autonomy, individual and aesthetic.
Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)
Periodization sequesters human experience. The historicist separation of the past from the present prohibits empathy with the past and therefore precludes criticism in the present.
Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)
Historicism runs counter to the specific capacity of the literary work to escape the limits of historical time, to allow for the cross-generational flourishing of tradition, and open the present to a multidimensional temporality.
Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)
The reified focus on the moment of literary production, in a distanced context—the typical topic of periodization—suppresses the experience of reception, the actualization of the past in the reader’s present.
Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)
Presentism implies not only a shift toward contemporary material (older material is denounced polemically as tied to dead authors), but an implicit structuring of time as always only a present, without a recollection of its past, without an aspiration to a future.
Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)
Language use is a curious behavior, but once the transition to language is made, literature is a likely consequence, since it is linked to the dynamic of the linguistic symbol through the functioning of the imagination.
Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)
The more rigorously criticism historicizes a work of art, in the sense of lodging it in the context of the moment of its production, the less likely it becomes for criticism to be able to explain either its own subsequent interest in the work or the possibility of lay—that is, nonacademic—interest in reading it.
Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)
The social sciences, ultimately, are about patterns, rules, and phenomena available to certain objective forms of explanation; the humanities, especially the study of literature, are about exceptional cases, singular works, and individuals that require subjective understanding.
Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)
The point is not that contemporaneity is insignificant. ... It is rather that there is something more important at stake in the temporal character of literature: its relation to history, understood as change and development, rather than as context and frame.
Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)
Flaubert poses as the outsider with insider information who excoriates a reality as degraded and mendacious. It is as if the literary standing of the author in the world of imagination and fiction paradoxically grants him a greater access to the truth than would be available in the falseness of empirical existence.
Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)