One Measures Oncoming Old Age

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.

We Can Be Reluctant To Recognize How Much Of Our Culture Was Literary, Particularly Now That So Many Of The Institutional Purveyors Of Literature Happily Have Joined In Proclaiming Its Death. A Substantial Number Of Americans Who Believe They Worship God Actually Worship Three Major Literary Characters: The Yahweh Of The J Writer (earliest Author Of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), The Jesus Of The Gospel Of Mark, And Allah Of The Koran.

The World Gets Older, Without Getting Either Better Or Worse And So Does Literature. But I Do Think That The Drab Current Phenomenon That Passes For Literary Studies In The University Will Finally Provide Its Own Corrective.

Rebecca Mead's My Life In Middlemarch Is A Wise, Humane, And Delightful Study Of What Some Regard As The Best Novel In English. Mead Has Discovered An Original And Highly Personal Way To Make Herself An Inhabitant Both Of The Book And Of George Eliot's Imaginary City. Though I Have Read And Taught The Book These Many Years I Find Myself Desiring To Go Back To It After Reading Rebecca Mead's Work.

The Second, And I Think This Is The Much More Overt And I Think It Is The Main Cause, I Have Been Increasingly Demonstrating Or Trying To Demonstrate That Every Possible Stance A Critic, A Scholar, A Teacher Can Take Towards A Poem Is Itself Inevitably And Necessarily Poetic.