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, ...

A s a precocious child in the early 1940s, the American philosopher Richard Rorty became a connoisseur of exotic flowers. His passion sent him hunting for wild orchids in the mountains of northwestern ...

THERE are five groups interested in literary criticism: publishers of books, authors, publishers of reviews, critics, and, finally, the reading public. An obvious interest of all the groups but the ...

“C riticism” is a curiously protean word. In academic discourse, as in ordinary speech, it can refer simply to the act of appraisal, sometimes with a censorious edge. It’s used to describe reviews, ...

What if every book was worth reading? Not just the books with silver medallions on their covers, but every hardcover featured at Barnes & Noble, every paperback foisted upon you by a friend or a ...

The chair of this year’s Man Booker Prize, and the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, does not like all The chair of this year’s Man Booker Prize, and the editor of the Times Literary Supplement ...

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 ...

A very interesting piece by Prof. Thomas Balazs in Quillette. An excerpt: When ChatGPT can analyse Hamlet as well as any grad student, we might reasonably ask, "What is the point of writing papers on ...

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 ...