“What a delightful library you have at Pemberly, Mr. Darcy!”
“It ought to be good,” he replied, “it has been the work of many generations.”
“And then you have added so much to it yourself, you are always buying books.”
“I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these.”
---Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice
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“The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life . . . This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.”
---Caitlin Flanagan, in “What Girls Want,” The Atlantic, December 2008
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“Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but for a naturalist he is wrong. For a naturalist, it is the examined life that is not worth living.”
---James W. Sire, in The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog
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Academic postmodernism is “a loosely structured constellation of ephemeral disciplines like cultural studies, gay and lesbian studies, science studies and post-colonial theory . . . that borrows freely from a host of works (in translation) by such scholars as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard. . . . Given the impossibility of imposing logical order on ideas as dissimilar as these, postmodernism is long on attitude and short on argument.”
---Mark Lilla, in “The Politics of Jacques Derrida,” New York Review of Books, June 25, 1998
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Happy Reading!
4 comments:
Lilla is a little harsh on postmodernism, don't you think? The idea of postmodernism is moving more and more away from a set, cohesive discipline and more toward a definition of a period. The reduction he's making is like trying to define the theory of modernism
Yes, I agree. The reason this quote appealed to me is not so much that it agrees with my take on postmodernism, but that I had class with a few people during my doctoral studies that this quote just pegged. They didn't seem to have any position at all--they just jumped here and there, throwing around quotes from those guys, and mostly only attacking any position another student espoused.
That makes a lot of sense! Sorry for being so defensive, immediately. I've found that I'm easily swayed by the argument of any theorist in any moment, so I'm working on figuring out whose camp I want to pitch my tent in.
Ian, I know what you're talking about. I think I've finally figured out, when it comes to literary theory, that I'm an Eclectic. I agree with bits and pieces of most theories, fairly large chunks of some, only a little of others. And I've decided that's an acceptable position for me.
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