Literary Theorist

Novalis

Literature

Romanticism

1772–1801

"Fate and temperament are the names of a concept."

🇫🇷Roland Barthes

semiotic literary criticism

Structuralism

1915–1980

"Roland Barthes and Photography by Ron Burnett"

🇺🇸Burton Rascoe

Journalism

1892–1957

"I am so constituted that I had rather read bad stuff than nothing."

🇫🇷Jean-François Lyotard

Philosophy

Continental philosophy

1924–1998

"I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives."

🇫🇷Gaston Bachelard

Philosophy

historical epistemology

1884–1962

"To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer."

Friedrich Schlegel

Philosophy

Romanticism

1772–1829

"Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom."

🇬🇧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."

🇫🇷Tzvetan Todorov

Literature

1939–2017

"American society has always exercised a stronger pressure on individual behavior than Western European societies; but in time of war this pressure is notched a few degrees, and starts to become quite alarming."

"Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round."

Denis Diderot

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1713–1784

"Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs."

🇺🇸Fredric Jameson

Literature

Postmodernism

1934–2024

"If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life."

🇺🇸Harold Bloom

Literature

Romanticism

1930–2019

"Hamlet, Kiekegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates."