I am always of easy faith in such matters, and am ever willing to be deceived, where the deceit is pleasant and costs nothing. I am therefore a ready believer in relics, legends, and local anecdotes of goblins and great men; and would advise all travellers who travel for their gratification to be the same. What is it to us, whether these stories be true or false, so long as we can persuade ourselves into the belief of them, and enjoy all the charm of the reality?

Washington Irving, "Stratford-on-Avon."

Likes are cured by likes. Deadening one fear with another is our salvation. Between the freshly cut pages of crime novels one seeks the idle or, if you like, virgin feelings of trepidation which could help us overcome the archaic ones of the journey.

Walter Benjamin, "Traveling with Crime Novels."

"An observer is a prince who is everywhere in possession of his incognito."

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 1938-1940, Vol.4

In Blanche's experience, the more a person believed love was a part of what they got from their employer, the more likely it was that the person was being asked to do things that only love could justify. (6)

Enjoy? If she [her employer] wanted the help to enjoy it, she'd pay more for fewer hours. (9)

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Materialist sharpness. I'm already beginning to love this book.

Does Lord Warburton have a right to be revolutionary?: on an social authenticity of being politically progressive

"emotional imperialist"

"Warburton's scrupulosity in the political arena extends to his social behavior, making it highly unlikely that he would practice emotional imperialism. Isabel misjudges him, as she misjudges Osmond, when she senses in Warburton's proposal of marriage "that a territorial, a political, a social magnate had conceived die design of drawing her into the system where he (rather invidiously) lived (and moved)"(PL 95; 506). She rejects the idea of marrying the nobleman because, as she sees it, the idea failed "to correspond to any vision of happiness" ("free exploration of life") (PL 101; 507).

Cheryl B. Torsney. "The Political Context of The Portrait of a Lady." The Henry James Review 7 (1986). 96.

Forget the epic, the master work. In American fortunes do not acculmulate, the soil does not grow, families have no history. Leave slow growth to the book reviewers, you only have time to explode. Remember William Carlos Williams' description of the pioneer women who shot their children against the wilderness like cannonballs. Do the same with your novels.

*   *   *

Psychology has nothing to do with reality nor should it be used as motivation. The novelist is no longer a psychologist. Psychology can become something much more important. The great body of case histories can be used int he way the ancient writers used their myths. Freud is your Bulfinch; you can not learn from him.

*   *   *

The psychology is theirs not mine. The imagery is mine.

*   *   *

I was serious therefore I could not be obscene.

I was honest therefore I could not be sordid.

A novelist can afford to be everything but dull.

"Some Notes on Miss L." Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Jay Martin.

Certainly the novel, as a genre inseparable from print and ingested in the home, seemed an inherently private art form. Unlike the oral drama, and unlike much early poetry, which was recited on public occasions, prose fiction was — and is — experienced in isolation. People commonly were alone when they read, and if they were not physically solitary, they were imaginatively cut off from the world around them through their engagement with the printed page. Even this engagement was a form of privacy or solitude. Eighteenth-century readers frequently penned their thoughts in the margins of the novel's pages, but their relation to the events and characters described within the story was nonreciprocal. Whereas theatergoers disrupted performances and sometimes forced changes in the action, novel readers were powerless to affect what happened in the narrative. Such passivity, combined with the subjective impression of involvement, could be construed as a kind of false consciousness, an ideological illusion corrosive of the participatory outlook necessary to republicanism.

Michael T. Gilmore, "The Literature of the Revolutionary and Early National Periods: the Novel." (621-622)

Not only the explanation of the reading novel in the Early American period, but there is something in this passage that tells us about the inherent individualistic passivity of the act; it can be also applied to the political implication of the act of reading today (unless one participates in the communal space, such as a reading seminar).

if we can say, in literary perspective, a form is significant as its content, the fact that a crime organization took the form from international trade might signify something common between the crime and capitalist logic; in a word, the crime-like signification inherent in the capitalism.

Another prominent, and regrettable, feature of debate during the faction fight was the tendency for comrades to explain what the argument was really  about. Thus “You may think you are objecting to the way a complaint of rape was handled, but in fact you are arguing against the historical agency of the working class, for permanent factions, against Leninism, etc. etc.”

“Another danger is to talk at people instead of to them. We have to learn to listen to what people are saying and respond. We can’t always choose the terms of discussion.”

“If you sit on Marx’s shoulders you see far, but if you sit on Marx’s shoulders and close your eyes, you don’t see very far at all.”

The capitalist state is highly centralised and we need a centralised party to confront it. True, but scarcely relevant at the present time. Neither the SWP nor any other group on the British far left could confront a bunch of drunken football hooligans, let alone a bourgeois state. The important thing at present is the battle of ideas; as William Morris put it, “it should be our special aim to make Socialists”

Such essentialist generalizations result in theoretical perspectives and political agendas that efface the problems, perspectives, and political concerns of many women who are marginalized in terms of their class, race, ethnicity, and
sexual orientation. For instance, analyses that trace women's subordination to their confinement to domestic roles and the private sphere can constitute problematic essentialist generalizations if they ignore that the links between femininity and the private sphere are not trans~historical but have arisen in particular historical contexts. Thus, while the ideology of domesticity may have immured many middle-class women in the home, it also sanctioned the economic exploitation of women slaves and working-class women, whose most pressing problems did not result from their confinement to the private sphere. (80-81)

I attribute some of the readings and misunderstandings of the essay to the triumphal rise of postmodernism in the U.S. academy in the past three decades. Although I have never called myself a “postmodernist,” some reflection on why my ideas have been assimilated under this label is important. In fact, one reason to revisit “Under Western Eyes” at this time is my desire to point to this postmodernist appropriation. I am misread when I am interpreted as being against all forms of generalization and as arguing for difference over commonalities. This misreading occurs in the context of a hegemonic postmodernist discourse that labels as “totalizing” all systemic connections and emphasizes only the mutability and constructedness of identities and social structures. (504)

In other words, this discussion allows me to reemphasize the way that differences are never just “differences.” In knowing differences and particularities, we can better see the connections and commonalities because no border or boundary is ever complete or rigidly determining. The challenge is to see how differences allow us to explain the connections and border crossings better and more accurately, how specifying difference allows us to theorize universal concerns more fully. It is this intellectual move that allows for my concern for women of different communities and identities to build coalitions and solidarities across borders. (505)