The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing....

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going...

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.

The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics.

To the jaded eye, all vampires seem alike, but they are wonderful in their versatility. Some come to life in moonlight, others are killed by the sun, some pierce with their eyes, others with fangs,...

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

The ambition of much of today’s literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

Favoring ‘resolution’ the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren’t satisfied unless at the end of the story...

A clever schoolboy’s reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.

Thus we come to the problem of determining what the poem is ‘about.’ Charles Altieri notes that ‘[a]n expression of the self can be one that is intended, the self’s act, or one that is...

Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when...

When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature

We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper...

Even in the act of fleeing modern ideologies, however, literary theory reveals its often unconscious complicity with them, betraying its elitism, sexism or individualism in the very ‘aesthetic’ or ‘unpolitical’ language it finds natural to...

The literary text seems like “a fortified medieval town –foreigners and outsiders are repelled, or allowed in only after rigorous checks, but within all is bustling life; exchange, mutual interdependence and influence are the rule.

There is, in fact, no need to drag politics into literary theory: as with South African sport, it has been there from the beginning. I mean by the political no more than the way we...

It doesn’t matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal...