Quotes About Literariness

Indeed, the hype around 'Watchmen' is its curse. If you want to enjoy the comic for what it is, ignore the attributions of literariness and the novelistic pretensions with which some critics have imbued it. This isn't high culture, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's good, juicy pulp fiction with a little nuclear apocalypse thrown in.

Great idea on the arrangement of my work. It will make a difference to me to disentangle certain passages, bring certain phrases in relief, help me to find my own bearings. The literalness is not to be attributed to the high and noble reasons I gave you (all that stuff on Rimbaud, metaphysical-artistic imperatives), just sheer laziness, between you and me.

Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the 'literariness' of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.