The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye.

Although I don't disagree that utterances express desires and try to make complexities precise, I actually don't think at all that any of our efforts to speak and mean things are ultimately why we speak.

Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is not prescriptive.

I do identify the escape hatch through which Foucault eludes the charge that he himself is an author/authority, hence a tyrant. He establishes the category of "founder of discursivity" for the authors he likes. Slippery, perhaps, but you can see what he means.

I'm a fan or naysayer like everyone else, not an authority of any kind.

I'm not only a romanticist but a romantic myself. I take it for granted the originality matters.

Every original poet has a new insight, or rather introduces a new power.