#criticism

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#criticism #find #how #literary #literary criticism

Tick is a humble genesis, tock a feeble apocalypse; and tick-tock is in any case not much of a plot. We need much larger ones and much more complicated ones if we persist in finding 'what will suffice.' And what happens if the organization is much more complex than tick-tock? Suppose, for instance, that it is a thousand-page novel. Then it obviously will not lie within what is called our 'temporal horizon'; to maintain the experience of organization we shall need many more fictional devices. And although they will essentially be of the same kind as calling the second of those two related sounds tock, they will obviously be more resourceful and elaborate. They have to defeat the tendency of the interval between tick and tock to empty itself; to maintain within that interval following tick a lively expectation of tock, and a sense that however remote tock may be, all that happens happens as if tock were certainly following. All such plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning. To put it another way, the interval must be purged of simple chronicity, of the emptiness of tock-tick., humanly uninteresting successiveness. It is required to be a significant season, kairos poised between beginning and end. It has to be, on a scale much greater than that which concerns the psychologists, an instance of what they call 'temporal integration'--our way of bundling together perception of the present, memory of the past, and expectation of the future, in a common organization. Within this organization that which was conceived of as simply successive becomes charged with past and future: what was chronos becomes kairos. This is the time of the novelist, a transformation of mere successiveness which has been likened, by writers as different as Forster and Musil, to the experience of love, the erotic consciousness which makes divinely satisfactory sense out of the commonplace person. ↗

— Frank Kermode

#experience

There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism. ↗

— Robert M. Hutchins

#criticism #distinguished #justification #must #only

Critics can be your most important friend. I don't read criticism of my stuff only because when it's bad, it's rough-and when it's good, it's not good enough. ↗

— Kevin Bacon

#because #criticism #critics #enough #friend

I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. ↗

— Mikhail Bakunin

#censure #character #criticism #freely #i

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity. ↗

— Joseph Addison

#criticism #defense #except #obscurity #their

In marriage there are no manners to keep up, and beneath the wildest accusations no real criticism. Each is familiar with that ancient child in the other who may erupt again. We are not ridiculous to ourselves. We are ageless. That is the luxury of the wedding ring. ↗

— Enid Bagnold

#again #ageless #ancient #beneath #child

There is one criticism which cannot be leveled at interparliamentary conferences but which is applicable to a great extent to peace congresses: the meetings waste time. ↗

— Fredrik Bajer

#cannot #conferences #congresses #criticism #extent

To love without criticism is to be betrayed. ↗

— Djuna Barnes

#criticism #love #to love #without

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#art form #aversion #between #conventional #criticism