Scratch A Schoolboy And You Find A

Reading A Text Is More Like Tracing This Process Of Constant Flickering Than It Is Like Counting The Beads On A Necklace.

The New Testament Is A Brutal Destroyer Of Human Illusions. If You Follow Jesus And Don't End Up Dead, It Appears You Have Some Explaining To Do. The Stark Signifier Of The Human Condition Is One Who Spoke Up For Love And Justice And Was Done To Death For His Pains. The Traumatic Truth Of Human History Is A Mutilated Body.

What Was Needed Was A Literary Theory Which, While Preserving The Formalist Bent Of New Criticism, Its Dogged Attention To Literature As Aesthetic Object Rather Than Social Practice, Would Make Something A Good Deal More Systematic And 'scientific' Out Of All This. The Answer Arrived In 1957, In The Shape Of The Canadian Northrop Fryes Mighty 'totalization' Of All Literary Genres, Anatomy Of Criticism .

If History Moves Forward, Knowledge Of It Travels Backwards, So That In Writing Of Our Own Recent Past We Are Continually Meeting Ourselves Coming The Other Way.

Evil Is Unintelligible. It Is Just A Thing In Itself, Like Boarding A Crowded Commuter Train Wearing Only A Giant Boa Constrictor. There Is No Context Which Would Make It Explicable.