Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, __ook at my beautiful home! Isn__ it fine?_ And not, __ook at the home so-and-so has built._ Thus we shouldn__ cry, __ook what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!_ But rather, __ook at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave?
Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its strongest - Johnson, Hazlitt, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Paul Valéer, among others - it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.
The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
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Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its strongest - Johnson, Hazlitt, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Paul Valéer, among others - it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.
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