A Quote by Louis Menand
One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but one of the functions of that is basically the sort of Consumer Reports function of letting readers know whether this is something they want to read.
Related Quotes
I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.
Literary men now routinely tell their readers about their divorces. One literary man who reviews books wrote, in reviewing a study of Ruskin, that he had never read a book by Ruskin but that the study confirmed him in his belief that he didn't want to read a book by Ruskin. This man very often writes about his family life.
What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.
I'm never a fan of the sociopathic kind of reviewing, people who are sort of self-immolating and have social problems or whatever, and let it out in literary-criticism form. I just feel like book reviewing should be respectful and calm and not filled with bile.
In the home we make certain distinctions about functions of rooms and corridors; we do not deliver the groceries straight into the baby's crib. In hospitals we do not take the food trolleys right through the operating chamber, and we rarely have the recreation room next to the convalescent room. We sort out the functions. We have to sort out the functions of the city and the streams of traffic and re-create arterial systems that allow us to breathe ... the shape, pattern and sense of community which you expect if it were a home.
There is artistic beauty to the way biology functions, nature functions, and science functions. I am trying to bring that kind of understanding in the design space.
I don't read reviews. Just because that is something that's directly connected to my job. I'm doing this because I love it, not because I'm necessarily looking for approval or anything like that. To me, it seems that reading reviews - whether they're good ones or bad ones - can only sort of force the person to divorce themselves from the reality of what it is they do for a living. So I don't read reviews.
I also encourage my students to read literary criticism that is deeply personal yet formally inventive and intellectually expansive... books that offer unorthodox ways of doing double duty as literary criticism and as love letters to the power of literature per se.
I generally don't read articles about myself/'Chappelle's Show,' nor do I read reviews. It's basically playing Russian Roulette. They're not all gonna be positive.
Everyone has an interest in the economy: in how it functions, how well it functions, and in whose interests it functions.
Institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.
Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.
On a spectrum of literary productions, memoir is just another form. If the person doing the reviewing or critiquing was ill-educated about literary forms, they could write something dunderheaded about the author or their life (I've seen these and barfed at them), but anyone who is well-practiced and educated in literature - why would they leave that at the door when entering memoir?
Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new.
What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I’m reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world.
I read reviews, I'm not going to lie to y'all. Like you know, I'll read 'em, but then, the next day I'm able to sort of shrug them off. But if something sort of sticks the next day, there's probably something to it. I just sort of really try to trust my gut on, on all that stuff.
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