Reading Well Makes Children More Interesting Both

To Read In The Service Of Any Ideology Is Not, In My Judgment, To Read At All.

Personality, In Our Sense, Is A Shakespearean Invention.

One Measures Oncoming Old Age By Its Deepening Of Proust, And Its Deepening By Proust. How To Read A Novel? Lovingly, If It Shows Itself Capable Of Accomodating One's Love; And Jealously, Because It Can Become The Image Of One's Limitations In Time And Space, And Yet Can Give The Proustian Blessing Of More Life.

Aesthetic Value Emanates From The Struggle Between Texts: In The Reader, In Language, In The Classroom, In Arguments Within A Society. Aesthetic Value Rises Out Of Memory, And So (as Nietzsche Saw) Out Of Pain, The Pain Of Surrendering Easier Pleasures In Favour Of Much More Difficult Ones ... Successful Literary Works Are Achieved Anxieties, Not Releases From Anxieties.

What Is Literary Tradition? What Is A Classic? What Is A Canonical View Of Tradition? How Are Canons Of Accepted Classics Formed,and How Are They Unformed? I Think That All These Quite Traditional Questions Can Take One Simplistic But Still Dialectical Question As Their Summing Up: Do We Choose Tradition Or Does It Choose Us, And Why Is It Necessary That A Choosing Take Place, Or A Being Chosen? What Happens If One Tries To Write, Or To Teach, Or To Think, Or Even To Read Without The Sense Of A Tradition? Why, Nothing At All Happens, Just Nothing.