Friday, November 04, 2022
A Collage of Quotations
Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 5, with notes on p. 273:
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In this book I have cited contemporaries so liberally that at times my text comes close to being a collage of quotations. Collector, non auctor, ego sum ('I am the collector, not the author').9 I have some sympathy with the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), whose ideal was a work consisting entirely of quotations, put together so skilfully that it could dispense with any accompanying text.10
9. Joannes Susenbrotus (1484/5-1542/3), cit. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1988), 331.
10. See the introduction by Hannah Arendt to her edition of Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (1973), 47.
