A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
A dialogue among civilizations can be seen as a dialogue between the individual and the universal.
Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.
Isn't that what writing is about? The constant attempt to understand the world?
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.
The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.
In order to be universal, you have to be rooted in your own culture.
Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.
If a writer doesn't do anything but give a new word to his language and, from there, maybe to other languages, I think that writer redefines the world.
I think writing for a world one has invented can be infinitely more interesting than writing for the world we've all inherited.
For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing.
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