J onathan Kramnick’s book Criticism and Truth is more modest than its title suggests. Essentially an apologia for the nuts-and-bolts work of literary studies, it is best described not as “ambitious” — ...

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, ...

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 ...

Seniors in the English Department have come together to host “Critical Pizza” sessions on Tuesday evenings over the last few weeks, introducing younger classmates to different types of literary ...

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 ...

Many people would say that it is a dream job: you’re essentially getting paid for reading books, talking to writers, travelling to literary festivals. What steps led you to this point in your life ...

Science fiction deserves scientific analysis. While conventional qualitative literary analysis has been extended to science fiction in a progressively more refined manner, quantitative analysis of the ...

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 ...

John Guillory’s “Cultural Capital,” published amid the 1990s canon wars, became a classic. In a follow-up, “Professing Criticism,” he takes on his field’s deep funk. By Jennifer Schuessler Thirty ...