Clifford Geertz Quotes

Critics and academics often employ theories and philosophers in order to help them understand and dissect movies and books.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'

Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

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.

I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

I haven't changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it... It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That's what modernism means to me.

Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.

The writer studies literature, not the world.

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods.

I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.

I like Jacques Derrida; I think he's funny. I like my philosophy with a few jokes and puns. I know that that offends other philosophers; they think he's not taking things seriously, but he comes up with some marvellous puns. Why shouldn't you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

I was reading a lot of Jacques Derrida at the time, writing 'Beth.' He actually talked about zombies.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.