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

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

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work.