Mr. Demetz, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Yale, makes no effort to impose a unitary interpretation on Brescia, nor does he overdraw its importance in the minds of the writers present.
As JM Coetzee, the South African novelist, put it in his book of essays, On Censorship: "The contest with the censor is all too likely to assume an importance in the inner life of the writer that at the least diverts him from his proper occupation and at worst fascinates and even perverts the imagination".
That rule doesn't hold when (as with Godard's "King Lear" or Renoir's "Madame Bovary") the filmmaker is an artist of comparable importance in the cinema to that of the writer in the literary realm.
Given the unique nature of the ICVS data and the importance of the topic in the writers' view, it was a challenge worth accepting.
Cassiodorus was neither a great writer nor a great scholar, but his importance in the history of Western culture can hardly be overestimated.
In the writer's imagination, in hindsight.
Cleopatra, Goldsworthy asserts, "only had importance in the wider world through her Roman lovers," but the seduction that assured her immortality was that of a Greek writer.
In The New Yorker in August, the writer Adam Gopnik argued for the importance of English majors.
"I'm under no illusions about the importance of my work," the writer Jorge Amado once said.
There is a "law" in admission: The value of a recommendation is usually inversely correlated to the "importance" of the recommendation writer.
