Famous Quotes & Sayings

Nancy Pearcey

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.

Mason Cooley

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

Karen Armstrong

He [Aristotle] pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any facts 'but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition.' Hence his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth.

Terry Eagleton

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

Terry Eagleton

What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .

Terry Eagleton

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Terry Eagleton

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

Terry Eagleton

If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

Terry Eagleton

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

C. S. Lewis

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

Charles Dickens

Literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.

Joseph Farrell

Literature and Society in the First Modern Period, 321 B.C. - A.D. 235,

David Mitchell

I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.

Dave Barry

The Internet: transforming society and shaping the future through chat.

Dave Barry

We idolized the Beatles, except for those of us who idolized the Rolling Stones, who in those days still had many of their original teeth.

Dave Barry

A gene can be either dominant or recessive, depending on which type of gene it is.

Dave Barry

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

David Quammen

Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.

George MacDonald Fraser

Political correctness is about denial, usually in the weasel circumlocutory jargon which distorts and evades and seldom stands up to honest analysis.

Edsger Dijkstra

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

Kip Thorne

'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.

Murray Rothbard

The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.

Michael Crichton

The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.

Mason Cooley

Jargon: any technical language we do not understand.

Theodor Adorno

What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.

Theodor Adorno

The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.

Kingman Brewster, Jr.

Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession.