46 Literary Theory Quotes
Following is our list of literary theory quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .
Famous Literary Theory Quotes
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch
Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. — Robert Morgan
A Christian philosophy of literature begins with the same agenda of issues that any philosophy of literature addresses. Its distinctive feature is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith. — Leland Ryken
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being. — Paul De Man
While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. — Cyril Connolly
A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work. — Andrei Tarkovsky
Literature provides us with the opportunity to escape into fictional worlds that are ultimately rooted in human universals shaped by common biological forces. — Gad Saad
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F. R. Leavis
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. — Ezra Pound
Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them. — Emile Zola
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and>metaphor. — Ogden Nash
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. — Yevgeny Zamyatin
Literary Criticism Quotes
How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored. — Arna Bontemps
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. — T. S. Eliot
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising. — D. H. Lawrence
The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived - not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve. — Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud. — H. L. Mencken
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. — George Orwell
Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself. — Robertson Davies
Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit. — John Fante
Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism. — Mason Cooley
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements. — Paul De Man
People Writing About Literary Theory
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 Iris Murdoch |
183 | 962 |
 Roland Barthes |
154 | 943 |
 Juan Ramon Jimenez |
19 | 165 |
 Robert Morgan |
58 | 324 |
 Leland Ryken |
23 | 118 |
 Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
334 | 3608 |
More Literary Theory Quotes
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was. — Terry Eagleton
I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to "truthiness." I am also someone who has been trained in deconstruction in the literary theory department of Yale University, so I am someone who is tempted to believe that no absolute truth is possible. — John Hodgman
As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth — H. L. Mencken
The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination. — Charles Simic
If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades. — Terry Eagleton
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. — Terry Eagleton
With a few exceptions, the critics of children's books are remarkably lenient souls.... Most of us assume there is something goodin every child; the critics go from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory. — Katharine Sergeant Angell White
I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there. — Harry Frankfurt
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures. — Terry Eagleton
Literary theories will not make a writer write. — Allen Wier
Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake. — Nancy Pearcey
One movement that I find interesting - this is not a movement in poetry necessarily, but there's a movement on a lot of campuses now called eco - criticism. It's a body of theory based on how nature is treated in literary works. That sort of interests me. — Ted Kooser
I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum. — Susan Sontag
He [Aristotle] pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any facts 'but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition.' Hence his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth. — Karen Armstrong
In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them. — Jorge Luis Borges
I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller. — Terry Eagleton
Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure. — Terry Eagleton
What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism . — Terry Eagleton
In my profession more generally, it's not an exaggeration to say that masculinity is viewed as the root of all evil. If you were to take a literary theory course, you might think it would be about literature, but it's really not. It's about all the various forms of oppression on earth and how we can see them playing out in literary works. And behind all these forms of oppression is a guy. — Jonathan Gottschall
Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind. — Gore Vidal
Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary studies have been slow to wake up to the importance of MSA (media-specific analysis). Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view. — N. Katherine Hayles
In Conclusion
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