I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)

To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.