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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.

— Russell Berman Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)

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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)

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)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Russell Berman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.