Ferdinand Christian Baur Quotes

Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.

People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so much the message, because the best authors do not have obvious messages. These authors were disturbing to my students because of their perspectives on life.

With Shakespeare, the hard work is to find out why he said it and how it can relate to the audience.

But stories don't only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.

Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

The greater the conceptual significance of a literary product, the more it should be assumed that it is based on an idea that determines the whole, and that the deeper consciousness of the time to which it belongs is reflected in it.

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn't read the one until after I'd written the other.

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque.

When I read 'Dream of Red Mansions,' I was really struck by the fact that it was built differently from a lot of genre works. Specifically, a lot of the events that should have taken centre-stage - wars, social upheavals - were seen entirely through the eyes of the women of a Chinese household.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Shakespeare set a lot of his dramas in a historical perspective or war perspective, or he would study what was going on at that time.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

When you look at 'Grapes of Wrath,' the weakest moments are those in which Steinbeck is spouting a political idea directly at the reader. The book's real power comes from its slower, broader movement.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

Knowing about authors' beliefs helps you understand how those beliefs influence their writing, and things you thought meant one thing, once you've got enough information about that writer, you suddenly realize mean an entirely different thing. That makes a difference.

Food is interesting to me because it's a way of understanding culture and societies and history. I would never write about food just as food. Just like I would never write about baseball just as baseball.

I don't think that books are wondrous, magical things that come from nowhere. It's important that a book has clues about where and how it was written.

As [John] Tolkien himself said, the story [Lord of the Ring ] is not allegorical. He said so when people tried to make analogies to World War II and the fight against Hitler and his fascist coalition.

Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written.