E. P. Thompson - Criticism

Criticism

Leszek KoĊ‚akowski wrote a very harsh criticism of Thompson in his 1974 essay "My Correct Views on Everything", picking apart Thompson's left-wing views. Tony Judt considered this rejoinder so authoritative to claim that "no one who reads it will ever take E.P. Thompson seriously again". His portrait of Thompson elicited some protests from readers, and other left-wing journals came to the defense of Thompson.

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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.
    George Steiner (b. 1929)

    When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.
    Ben Hecht (1893–1964)

    I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
    Ezra Pound (1885–1972)