Literary Studies

🇨🇦Marshall McLuhan

Philosophy

1911–1980

"The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations."

🇬🇧Anthony Burgess

Music

1917–1993

"The window opened gently and a still Autumn night entered cat-like. Edwin smelt freedom and London autumn – decay, smoke, cold, motor oil."

🇺🇸Sheldon Pollock

Literature

b. 1948

"There is nothing remarkable about the people in premodern South Asia having a clear and accurate conception of the spatial organization of their world."

🇬🇧Terry Eagleton

Literature

New Left

b. 1943

"The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present."

🇨🇭John Pentland Mahaffy

Literature

1839–1919

"With Alexander the stage of Greek influence spread across the world."

"The heart of Rousseau's thinking, as Arthur Melzer and others have shown, is to honor modern individualism but at the same time to subject it to a devastating critique."

🇺🇸X. J. Kennedy

Literature

1929–2026

"I am one of the endangered species: people who still write in meter and rime."

"John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. I like to read Archie Ammons, my great friend. And Harold Bloom, another former student."

🇬🇧Robert Graves

Literature

1895–1985

"Official website for 'La Casa de Robert Graves' in Deia, Majorca. Robert Graves Foundation"

"Poetry cannot report the event, it must be the event, lived through in a form that can speak about itself while remaining wholly itself."

🇷🇺Lev Vygotsky

Psychology

1896–1934

"As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development."

"One way of looking at poetic periods is to notice what contemporary interests and knowledge penetrate the best verse written at the time and what moods are permitted in treating of these matters."

🇬🇧Stephen Potter

Literature

1900–1969

"Talk of the "imperial decay" of your invalid port. "Its gracious withdrawal from perfection, keeping a hint of former majesty withal, as it hovers between oblivion and the divine Untergang of infinite recession."