Skip to content

Literature is most social when it is least social.

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

Another quote →

Topics

Books

More quotes by Russell Berman

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)

All Russell Berman quotes →

You may also like

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

Attribution

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.