“Life was transparent, literature opaque. Life was open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things, literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be: if you were afraid your plane would crash it was about death, if you were trying to get a girl into bed it was about sex. Literature was never about what it appeared to be about, though in the case of the novel cosiderable ingenuity and perception were needed to crack the code of realistic illusion, which was why he had been professionally attracted to the genre (even the dumbest critic understood that Hamlet wasn't about how the guy wanted to kill his uncle, or the Ancient Mariner about cruelty to animals, but it was surprising how many people thought Jane Austen's novels were about finding Mr Right).” LifeDeathLiteratureSexNovelCriticismJane Austen Book:Changing Places Source: Changing Places
“Paraphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deduction is that novels are paraphrasable whereas poems are not. But this is a false deduction because close analysis is itself a disguised form of paraphrase.” FormPoetryLiteratureNaturalNovelCriticsAnalysisIndispensableDeductionsSummaryParaphraseLyric Poetry Book:Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel Source: Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel
