“First of all, writing is a way to find community with others, to discover whether you share judgment with them. Secondly, literary-critical debates are efforts to express what someone in a culture sees as urgent and important. Interpretation (or what I understand as simply “reading”) is where a culture comes to consciousness of itself. . . . I also think all literature expresses the experience of being human in a specific time and place. So a key word for me is experience, which has been anathema for quite a long while. Literature is one of the forms through which we can come to understand something about our own experiences. That’s another crucial reason why discussions of literature matter.”
— Toril Moi, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Literature at Duke University
