Russell Berman: Quotes about literature

Russell Berman is American academic. Explore interesting quotes on literature.
Russell Berman: 34   quotes 0   likes

“The simultaneity of the disappearance of literature (as aesthetic) and history (as development), which we can observe around us in the academy, points to a fundamental commonality; unraveling one implies unraveling the other, since both are grounded in the same goal-oriented structures that postmodern sensibility opposes. Both civilizational history and autonomous literature are constitutively teleological, dependent on notions of progress toward goals, and they both therefore face resistance from the antidevelopmentalism of contemporary intellectual life.”

Russell Berman

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 8.

Life , History , Literature , Dependency

“The relevance of canonicity has nothing to do with the notion of codified establishments of hierarchical judgment (for which it typically attracts revisionist hostility). Instead, canonicity is important as the capacity to permit vibrant reading relationships to works from the past. … Whatever else the canon may do, its primary function has been the preservation of the reception of literature across periodic borders, thereby calling into question the significance of those borders or the fetishism of contexts. The canon tunnels under the Berlin Wall that periodizers erect between literary regimes. As a fundamental level, therefore, periodization stands at odds with canonicity. Canonicity maintains, cultivates, and develops community over time and across generations; periodization breaks up that identity and suppresses the historical continuities through a strategy of temporal separation.”

Russell Berman

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 19.

Hostility , Communication , Literature , Question

“The modern reading of ancient literature involves a mode of reception that is not merely scholarly or antiquarian. Instead, aesthetic experience allows for a direct relationship between reader and work, despite the historical distance. Today’s consumer cannot participate in the ancient economy by trying to use an Athenian coin as legal tender; but today’s reader can participate in the ancient literary imagination though an authentic engagement with the Homeric text (no matter how much contemporary circumstances necessarily also enter into that encounter with the ancient text). Thus the historicist imperative of periodization evidently stands at odds with the potential for immediacy associated with literary reception and aesthetic experience.”

Russell Berman

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 14.

Imagination , Literature , Reading

“The social sciences, ultimately, are about patterns, rules, and phenomena available to certain objective forms of explanation; the humanities, especially the study of literature, are about exceptional cases, singular works, and individuals that require subjective understanding.”

Russell Berman

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 23.

Literature , Understanding , Study , Science

“The failing of contemporary criticism is double: Hand in hand with the suppression of aesthetic autonomy, one finds also a growing reluctance to recognize the complex and dynamic temporality of literature. By dynamic temporality I mean that immanent sense of time within the literary work, its ability to reach backward, as part of a tradition, and forward, as a vehicle of innovation and anticipation. This sort of temporality is quite different from a single-minded and frequently reductionist focus on historical context.”

Russell Berman

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 5.

Literature , Sense , Time , Parting

“Language use is a curious behavior, but once the transition to language is made, literature is a likely consequence, since it is linked to the dynamic of the linguistic symbol through the functioning of the imagination.”

Russell Berman

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 45

Behavior , Imagination , Literature

“Literature is most social when it is least social.”

Russell Berman

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 62

Literature

“The point is not that contemporaneity is insignificant. … It is rather that there is something more important at stake in the temporal character of literature: its relation to history, understood as change and development, rather than as context and frame.”

Russell Berman

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 14.

History , Literature , Change