stack of books and open notebook. Label: Quotation

Quotation: Writing About Literature


“First of all, writing is a way to find community with others, to discover whether you share judgment with them. Secondly, literary-critical debates are efforts to express what someone in a culture sees as urgent and important. Interpretation (or what I understand as simply “reading”) is where a culture comes to consciousness of itself. . . . I also think all literature expresses the experience of being human in a specific time and place. So a key word for me is experience, which has been anathema for quite a long while. Literature is one of the forms through which we can come to understand something about our own experiences. That’s another crucial reason why discussions of literature matter.”

Toril Moi, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Literature at Duke University

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