Franz Kafka believes:
"Literature is an ax wielded against the frozen sea within us."
To me, in each person, it depends on the thickness of the ice!
While any attempts to define literature would never prove fruitful, I've always enjoyed reading the Russian Formalists and those thinkers associated with the Geneva School in criticism, Poulet and Blanchot among my favorites. They're of high value, to me, in giving deep insights into the mysterious world of words. As put forth amazingly by Poulet, literature is itself the talking voice speaking to itself, and in this talking, it can be overheard by the expert listener, who will turn to be the audience.
So . . . as Victor Shklovsky believes, "The function of art is to challenge habitualization,"
we'd better always look for the 3rd dimension beyond Either/Or.
As
Rainer Maria Rilke believes :"
Works of art are an infinite loneliness and are nothing to be so little reached as with criticism. Only Love can grasp and hold and fairly touch them."DO NOT forget that you'll only find in a text whatever you have brought with you.
So,
Mr. Twain
is here
to teach the first lesson...
I hope the following collection would help the students and motivate them to find the text itself as the only critical note and the best source to get the meaning.
Let's keep in mind that
form is the embodiment of meaning
and
the best way to defend language is to attack it.
You can write to me for more information... There is the obligation to express, while there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express...
V a h i d
" N o n - D r a m a t i c "
Great Writers on the Internet "Montgomery College Library (D.Cox)" . . .
James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" . . .
William Faulkner's "The Sound and the fury" . . .
William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" . . .
Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" . . .
"The Metamorphosis" A Study Guide . . .
Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and punishment" . . .
Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground" . . .
Albert Camus' "The Stranger" . . .
Stephen Crane's "The red badge of courage" . . .
Ernest Hemingway's "The old man and the sea" . . .
Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles " . . .
Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" . . .
Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" . . .
J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" . . .
F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" . . .
William Golding's "Lord of the flies" . . .
" D r a m a t i c "
Sophocles (496-406 BC)'s "Antigone" . . .
Aeschylus (525-456)'s "Agamemnon" . . .
Euripides (480? BCE-406? BCE)'s "Medea" . . .
Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" . . .
Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?" . . .
" E s s a y s "
Dr. Earl Anderson's "Malory's Morte Darthur" . . .
Dr. Richard Palmer "Seven Key Terms in The Philosophy of Gadamer" . . .
Dr. Richard Palmer "Religion, Art, Literature" . . .
Dr. Richard Palmer "Attacks on Gadamer" . . .
Dr. Richard Palmer "on The Truth of the Word" . . .
Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art ..." . . .
T. S. Eliot "Hamlet and His Problems" . . .
T. S. Eliot "on Christopher Marlowe" . . .
T. S. Eliot "Tradition and the Individual Talent" . . .
"Critical Approaches to Literature" . . .
R. Barthes "The Death of the Author" . . .
Edgar Allan Poe "The Philosophy of Composition" . . .
R. Barthes "From Mythtoday" . . .
A Wonderful Essay by Paul Ricoeur . . .
T. E. Hulme "Romanticism & Classicism" . . .
Arthur Miller "Tragedy and the Common Man" . . .
Caroline Shaeffer "The Subject of Narration" . . .
Meditations Of First Philosophy . . .
A. Schopenhauer "The Art of Literature" . . .
T. S. Eliot "Essays on Poetry and Criticism" . . .
A Student's Guide to the Study of Literature . . .
The Beginning of Postmodern Times . . .
Locke's Philosophy of Language . . .
The Translatability of Texts . . .
Nietzsche's Metaphisics in Birth of Tragedy . . .
Richard Raskin "Camus's Critiques of Existentialism" . . .
Albert Camus "The Myth of Sisyphus" . . .
Dr. Tim Morris' Essay "1" . . .
Dr. Tim Morris' Essay "2" . . .
Here's the photo of my ever-favorite Literary Theorist, Critic, and Thinker,
Paul de Man
who maintains
"a literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the
authority of its own rhetorical mode,"
believes:
"Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does
not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means . . . Literature exists at the
same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being . . .
Literature . . . is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and,
consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself."
V a h i d
