I myself always want to talk about "poetry," not "the poem."

The mantra of the new historicists was "we have betrayed ourselves." Since their emergence, there have been more or less interesting paradigm shifts having mainly to do with Habermas and the increased focus on media studies, but the talismanic word has never ceased to be "history."

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.

I don't think theory adds to criticism. (Methodology does, for better or worse.) Theory's function is to make criticism self-conscious, maybe even a little sheepish, about its ex cathedra pronouncements.

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.

Authors we are in danger of accepting as gospel, whereas founders of discursivity provide permeable ideas that we can elaborate upon in a tradition of constructive dialogue.

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.