Leslie Fiedler
Leslie Fiedler
Leslie Aaron Fiedlerwas an American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work also involves application of psychological theories to American literature. His most cited work is Love and Death in the American Novel...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth8 March 1917
CountryUnited States of America
tolerance analysis lows
I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.
less literature merely piece verbal
The ''text'' is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.
american-critic art both folk form
The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.
call large love people prefer queer themselves
I love it now that a large minority of people who are handicapped prefer to call themselves crippled. This is all part of the game, like queer theory.
american-critic blow clear somebody
What I really dream of is that somebody would blow everything I've done out of the water in a beautiful way, which would clear the way for something better to come along.
american-critic
Writers always know whether you like them or not.
art criticism way
All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.
france mets agree
Foucault was the one person I met in France that I could talk to. He was a mensch. You know whether you agree with him or not because you know what he is saying.
people historical generations
Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.
lasts facts poet
I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.
destiny america imagine
To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.
firefighter people want
I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
running dream men
There is a place in men's lives where pictures do in fact bleed, ghosts gibber and shriek, maidens run forever through mysterious landscapes from nameless foes; that place is, of course, the world of dreams and of the repressed guilts and fears that motivate them [i.e., the unconscious]. This world the dogmatic optimism and shallow psychology of the Age of Reason had denied; and yet this world it is the final, perhaps the essential, purpose of the gothic romance to assert.
wrestling arms affection
I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.