"Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism."

"Deconstruction... insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional."

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

"All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some ob…"

"The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always …"

"Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of …"

"Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a fra…"

"What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attenti…"

"Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a neckl…"

"Chaucer was a class traitor Shakespeare hated the mob Donne sold out a bit later Sidney was a nob."