To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since... we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue t...o reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Stripped of incidental ornaments, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are seen as the same dream dreamed twice over, the second time a...s nightmare; though, to be sure, the terror of the second dream is already at work in the first, whose euphoria persists strangely into the second. In both books, there is a pretended, a quasi-ritual death to the community and its moral codes; though in Tom Sawyer that death is a "lark" undertaken in childish pique, while in Huckleberry Finn it is a last desperate evasion, an act of self-defense. In both, there is a consequent spying on the community from cover to watch the effects of that death, the aftermath of regret: the childish dream of the suicide, who longs to be present at his own discovery, come true. In the one case, however, the spying is a prelude to a triumphant return, a revelation, in the other, to a further flight and concealment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The "text" is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the s...ociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »