Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Criticism is an act of engagement that makes the subject part of the critic's mind.
In plain terms
When you critique something, you are claiming it as your own through analysis.
What can you take from it?
Critique builds a personal connection to the work.

Where it applies

  • academic review
  • art critique
  • literary analysis

Putting it to work

  • engage deeply with texts
  • form personal opinions

Questions to consider

  • Does critique empower or diminish the original work?

Another view

Not all criticism seeks to appropriate or understand fully.

More from Henry James

  1. The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that th…

    Permalink to quote #66
  2. The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

    Permalink to quote #68
  3. No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the thi…

    Permalink to quote #65

Related quotes

  1. And for the greatest movie artists where there is a unity of technique and subject, one doesn't need to talk about technique much because it has been subsumed …

    Pauline KaelPauline Kael quote #17
  2. The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest…

    Henry JamesHenry James quote #27
  3. I detrattori della corruptibilita meriterebber d'esser cangiati in statue.

    Galileo GalileiGalileo Galilei quote #1