Frank Lentricchia

«Behind closed doors, with only undergraduates in attendance, I become something of a rhapsode. As Plato says in Ion, rhapsodes are enthusiasts. We're out of our minds. Like all rhapsodes, I like to recite from the text. I tell my students that in true recitation, we're possessed, we are the medium for the writer's voice. I speak the text as the writer would speak it - this is my radical and unverifiable claim - and the phrases and sentences flow out of me as they flowed from him in the process of creating the text. The writer flows into me and out of me: my mouth his exit into our world.
My listener-students, in the moment of recitation, are infused, taken over by the writer's original voice embodied in me. They too become possessed. Rhapsode and audience assume a single strange consciousness, not their own: "living", not " knowing", the text. We are simply, and collectively, mad.
Because I am an imperfect rhapsode, I bring to my students what I know about literary history, the author's life and times, literary forms, types, and styles: real knowledge, slowly and sometimes painfully gained over a lifetime, which takes me to the brink of the text itself. (...) I share this knowledge with my students, but it doesn't substitute for an honest act of reading.»

Frank Lentricchia, «Last Will and Testament of an ex-Literary Critic». in Lingua Franca, September/October, 1996