“Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.”
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The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
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Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
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The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.
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