I Have Never Believed That The Critic

The Morality Of Scholarship, As Currently Practiced, Is To Encourage Everyone To Replace Difficult Pleasures By Pleasures Universally Accessible Precisely Because They Are Easier.

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.

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.

Reading The Very Best Writers—let Us Say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is Not Going To Make Us Better Citizens. Art Is Perfectly Useless, According To The Sublime Oscar Wilde, Who Was Right About Everything. He Also Told Us That All Bad Poetry Is Sincere. Had I The Power To Do So, I Would Command That These Words Be Engraved Above Every Gate At Every University, So That Each Student Might Ponder The Splendor Of The Insight.

I Don't Believe In Myths Of Decline Or Myths Of Progress, Even As Regards The Literary Scene.