Interpretive Strategies Quotes

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

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.

Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself.

Deconstruction glorifies the critic, humiliates the author, and makes the reader wonder why he bothered.

Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.

Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed.

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.

I'm always trying to, using literature, subvert people's responses.

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

In working towards ways of reading Mann, so that his own advances in suggesting new perspectives will become more vivid, I do some fairly standard philosophical analysis of ideas in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.