“In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now?”

"Fallen Western Star," Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generical…" by Dana Gioia?

Dana Gioia80

American writer 1950

Related quotes

“There is no greater vocation than to serve. But there is no greater purpose than to love. Live a life that does both, and you’ll be truly happy.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Letter of advice to British diplomat Tom Fletcher's son. https://twitter.com/TFletcher/status/1033597850729570304 <br class="br">2000s, 2008

“The great and present danger to American literature is the growing homogeneity of our writers, especially the younger generation. Often raised in several places in no specific cultural or religious community, educated with no deep connection to a region, history, or tradition, and now employed mostly in academia, the American writer is becoming as standardized as the American car--functional, streamlined, and increasingly interchangeable”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

27
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“The writer is an ordinary man, not a spokesman for the people, and that literature can only be the voice of one individual. Writing that becomes an ode to a country, the standard of a nation, the voice of a party… loses its nature—it is no longer literature. Writers do not set out to be published, but to know themselves. Although Kafka or Pessoa resorted to language, it was not in order to change the world. I, myself, believe in what I call cold literature: a literature of flight for one's life, a literature that is not utilitarian, but a spiritual self-preservation in order to avoid being stifled by society. I believe in a literature of the moment, for the living. You have to know how to use freedom. If you use it in exchange for something else, it vanishes.”

Gao Xingjian (1940) Chinese novelist and playwright

Interview by Jean-Luc Douin http://web.archive.org/web/20130421061108/http://my.opera.com/PRC/blog/?startidx=560

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

Samuel Johnson London

A Review http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/jenyns.html of Soame Jenyns' A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, published in the first volume of Miscellaneous and Fugitive Pieces (London, 1774), p. 23

“All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what’s cool.”

Steven Brust (1955) American fantasy and science fiction author

Source: The Paths of the Dead

“But satire, ever moral, ever new,
Delights the reader and instructs him, too.
She, if good sense refine her sterling page,
Oft shakes some rooted folly of the age.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

La satire, en leçons, en nouveautés fertile,
Sait seule assaisonner le plaisant et l'utile,
Et, d'un vers qu'elle épure aux rayons du bons sens,
Détromper les esprits des erreurs de leur temps.
Satire 9
Satires (1716)