“Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people’s theories and an oblivion to one’s own” (xii).
“The idea that there is a single ‘normal’ language, a common currency shared equally by all members of society, is an illusion. Any actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses, diff entailed according to class, region, gender, status, and so on, which can by no means be neatly unified into a single homogenous linguistic community. One person’s norm may be another’s deviation” (4).
“The context tells me that it [Knut Hamsun’s Hunger] is literary; but the language itself has no inherent properties or qualities which might distinguish it from other kinds of discourse” (5).
“‘literature’ may be at least as much a question of what people do to writing as of what writing does to them” (6).
“Literature, in the sense of a set of works of assured and unalterable value, din stingingly by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist” (9).
“‘Value’ is a transitive term […] It is thus quite possible that, given a deep enough transformation of our history ,me may in the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of Shakespeare” (10).
“‘Our’ Homer is not identical with the Homer of the Middle Ages, nor ‘our’ Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is rather that different historical periods have constructed a ‘different’ Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to value or devalue, though not necessarily the same ones” (11).
“Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to guarantee their truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to, that something useful is accompanied by making them, and so on” (11).
“Interests are constitutive of our knowledge, not merely prejudices which imperil it” (12).
“The largely concealed structure of values which informs and underlies our factual statements is part of what is meant by ‘ideology’ […] those modes of feeling! valuing, perceiving and believing which have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power (13).
The theory or ideology of literature refers “not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over oths” (14).