Ideas and Literary Criticism
Sedgwick's oeuvre ranges across a wide variety of media and genres; poetry and artworks are not easily separated from the rest of her texts. Disciplinary interests included literary studies, history, art history, film studies, philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology, women’s studies and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) studies. Her theoretical interests have been synoptic, assimilative and eclectic.
Her work may be best suited to literary students who can cope with, make up their own minds about, and appreciate Sedgwick’s sometimes elaborate prose. She was fond of neologisms, and of extending the meaning of existing words and phrases in new directions. In her own estimate, her style of writing cannot be called easy to understand or clear in meaning, either. Sedgwick was not without her critics, however. Elizabeth Kantor, for example, suggests that Sedgewick's scholarship is seriously lacking, as when she "find some slight similarity between a Jane Austen novel and another text, and then argue from the other text."
Read more about this topic: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Famous quotes containing the words ideas and, ideas, literary and/or criticism:
“Young children...are often uninterested in conversation It is not that they don’t have ideas and feelings, or need to express them to others It is simply that as one eight-year-old boy once told me, “Talking is okay, but I don’t like to do it all the time the way grown-ups do; I guess you have to develop the habit.””
—Robert Coles (20th century)
“The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Dining-out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)