“It is apparently very congenial for some people who are professionally concerned with fictional texts to be told that all texts are really fictional anyway, and that claims that fiction differs significantly from science and philosophy can be deconstructed as a logocentric prejudice, and it seems positively exhilarating to be told that what we call "reality" is just more textuality. Furthermore, the lives of such people are made much easier than they had previously supposed, because now they don't have to worry about an author's intentions, about precisely what a text means, or about distinctions within a text between the metaphorical and the literal, or about the distinction between texts and the world because everything is just a free play of signifiers. The upper limit, and I believe the reductio ad absurdum, of this "sense of mastery" conveyed by deconstruction, is in Geoffrey Hartman's claim that the prime creative task has now passed from the literary artist to the critic.”

"The Word Turned Upside Down", The New York Review of Books, Volume 30, Number 16, October 27, 1983.

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 "It is apparently very congenial for some people who are professionally concerned with fictional texts to be told that a…" by John Rogers Searle?
John Rogers Searle photo
John Rogers Searle 37
American philosopher 1932

Related quotes

Eleanor Roosevelt photo
Marvin Minsky photo
Susie Bright photo
G. K. Chesterton photo
Rod Serling photo

“It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

The Twilight Zone, "The Fugitive" (1962).
The Twilight Zone

Osamu Tezuka photo
Doris Lessing photo

“What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

Boston Book Review interview by Harvey Blume http://www.dorislessing.org/boston.html (February 1998)

“As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.”

Charles de Lint (1951) author

"Tallulah" in Dreams Underfoot : The Newford Collection (2003), p. 399

Yan Lianke photo

“Reality is much more absurd and complex than any fiction.”

Yan Lianke (1958) Chinese novelist and satirist

"China on China, Culture for Billions" Documentary

Rod Serling photo

Related topics