As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.
Being an English major prepares you for impersonating authority.
Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best.
The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.
Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language).
I think that good writing is based on good reading. Maybe it's not about writing today, maybe it's about reading today. Maybe it's about finding the sort of book you would never read.
I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.
That was the problem ... with trusting to the written word ... We were human, mortal and fallible. We forgot, we made errors, argued ambiguities, and twisted meanings to suit our own ends. And in doing so, mayhap we reshaped the gods themselves.
My view, as one who taught it, is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don't think any teacher should try to 'teach an author,' but rather simply describe what the author has written. And this is what I tried to do.
It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names to our errors.
There are few things that are more revealing about someone than the way that they talk about a piece of literature or a play. You very quickly come to have a much deeper understanding of someone than you would if you just mingled together in a pub saying, 'All right, how are you?'
Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.
The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
