The mantra of the new historicists was "we have betrayed ourselves." Since their emergence, there have been more or less interesting paradigm shifts ….

Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is no….

The basic change in the landscape since my salad days started with the defensive rediscovery of history and politics by all the theoretically-oriente….

Satire about any and all professionals with a special vocabulary has been a staple of fiction and popular ridicule since the 18th century..

I do identify the escape hatch through which Foucault eludes the charge that he himself is an author/authority, hence a tyrant. He establishes the ca….

Both the 18th and the early 20th centuries, however, feature brilliant attacks on originality, and it's no doubt one of the hallmarks of romanticism ….

I don't think theory adds to criticism. (Methodology does, for better or worse.) Theory's function is to make criticism self-conscious, maybe even a ….

I beg my reader to consider the "evidence" I provide for my case and perhaps feel persuaded as a result. Beyond that I make no claim..

I make a distinction between theory and methodology, the latter being the practical deployment of a premise. Theory on the contrary may well be appli….

I myself always want to talk about "poetry," not "the poem.".

Every original poet has a new insight, or rather introduces a new power..

The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, en….

Although I don't disagree that utterances express desires and try to make complexities precise, I actually don't think at all that any of our efforts….

The rhetoric of theory is always in a bind. It pronounces ideas and denounces failures to accept or grasp them while insisting that there are no grou….

I'm a fan or naysayer like everyone else, not an authority of any kind..

Authors we are in danger of accepting as gospel, whereas founders of discursivity provide permeable ideas that we can elaborate upon in a tradition o….

I'm not only a romanticist but a romantic myself. I take it for granted the originality matters..