For all the debates that have roiled literature departments over the past 60 years, the history of the discipline itself is a source of surprising consensus. According to the standard narrative, ...

The truly interesting thing about those articles, however, is that they demonstrate the huge gap between the new literary criticism taking place online and the media’s ability to respond to it. In ...

T hese are bad times for literary studies. The catastrophically constricted job market for English Ph.D.s conveys the culture’s contempt for professional literary scholarship in the clearest terms.

Of the character sketches that the English satirist Samuel Butler wrote in the mid-seventeenth century—among them “A Degenerate Noble,” “A Huffing Courtier,” “A Small Poet,” and “A Romance Writer”—the ...

I WANT to talk about the historical interpretation of literature — that is, about the interpretation of literature in its social, economic, and political aspects. To begin with, it will be worth while ...

The award of the Goncourt Prize, a prestigious French literature award, to Senegalese author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr in 2021 marks the first recognition of a sub-Saharan author by this institution in ...

The scene: a graduate seminar in literature sometime in the eerily becalmed days of the mid-1990s, when for an aspirant to an academic job, the future seemed poised to break in one of two ...

Provides a basic skills course designed to equip students to handle the English major. Emphasizes critical writing and the acquisition of basic techniques and vocabulary of literary criticism through ...

When I was in high school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I was yanked from my literary somnolence by a teacher whose lessons were essentially acid tests to evaluate whether his students had working ...

For years, the writer flirted and exchanged ideas with Amélie Bosquet—until her ideas threatened his work. Criticism has a way of surviving without infrastructure, but there is no replacement for ...