Modern criticism has concerned itself more with poetry than with fiction for several reasons. First, fiction does not lend itself ...so readily as verse to the close analytical approach. Second, there is no body of critical theory upon the subject of fiction comparable to the poetic theory available to the critic of poetry. Third, the tremendous output of short fiction and novels tends to obscure the total picture and to make the initial problem of selection and evaluation extremely difficult. The result is that fiction, when it has been examined, has been subjected to the same criteria as those applied to verse; sometimes, as in the case of such authors as James, Joyce, or Kafka, with excellent results; at other times, with authors such as Tolstoi, Mann, or Hemingway, the results have either been bad or criticism has limited itself to discussion of the authors' lives, their social background, or their historical importance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this ...theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By an application of the theory of relativity to the taste of readers, to-day in Germany I am called a German man of science, and ...in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be regarded as a bĂȘte noire the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which... it lives on as a limiting case.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »