Inclusion:
28 July 2021
"For master-pieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. "
Source: A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf;
29 July 2021
"We must wish to know what is best to read. Life is too short for reading much more than what Arnold once called 'the best that is known and thought in the world'. "
Source: "A SURVEY OF MEDIEVAL VERSE" BY JOHN SPIERS, Lecturer in English, the University of Exeter. The Age of Chaucer. The Pelican Guide to English Literature Edited by BORIS FORD. Volume I. Penguin Books. 1962. Made and printed in Great Britain.
7 August 2021
"What Goethe meant by Weltliteratur is in fact very different from comparative literature. World literature deals with the circulation of literatures through nations. It does not consist in studying these very circulations. It studies the masterpieces of all literatures as a kind of heritage of humankind. Great works could belong to the whole of humankind through translations and become a cultural heritage beyond nations. "
Source: Franco B. (2018) Comparative Literature and World Literature: From Goethe to Globalization. In: Fang W. (eds) Tensions in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0635-8_2 .
17 September 2021
"What Cooper wrote after The Spy, or which among his later novels is his real masterpiece- these matters do not concern us here, since he dies (in 1851) thirty years before the beginning of the period mainly engaging us. But with The Spy he poured blood into the almost empty veins of American literature, and with that book the American novel as an independent non-European thing began."
Source: Ward, A C. “Toward Liberation.” American Literature 1880-1930, Books Way, 2010, pp. 14–15.
29 October 2021
"James Joyce was and remains almost unique among novelists in that he published nothing but masterpieces" The Times Literary Supplement
"It was this: what one expects to find at the very center of life or literature- the Summation of a Great Tradition, a touchstone of Taste- may only be the dream of the deprived, or the illusion of the powerless."- "Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition" (2004), The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha;
24 February 2022
"A course in World Literature will be more effective than any single literature in securing for the reader "the aims of literary culture"." (pp. 16)
Source: The Unity of World Literature and Indian Literature by Vinayak Krishna Gokak. S. Nijalingappa Endowment Lectures delivered at the Bangalore University, Bangalore. 1976.