The Idea Of Herman Melville

I Am Naive Enough To Read Incessantly Because I Cannot, On My Own, Get To Know Enough People Profoundly Enough.

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.

Indeed The Three Prophecies About The Death Of Individual Art Are, In Their Different Ways, Those Of Hegel, Marx, And Freud. I Don't See Any Way Of Getting Beyond Those Prophecies.

Criticism In The Universities, I'll Have To Admit, Has Entered A Phase Where I Am Totally Out Of Sympathy With 95% Of What Goes On. It's Stalinism Without Stalin.

I Would Say That There Is No Future For Literary Studies As Such In The United States.