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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Did Kenneth Burke, intellectual maverick, accidentally create cultural studies? At the age of 20, Kenneth Burke left academic life for good; or so he thought. “It is now time for me to quit college,” ...

Perhaps, you may have caught a glimpse of me milling around campus these past few weeks. If so, you would likely have noticed my trendsetting new accessory: a rotund, corpulent book. If you were ...

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 ...

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 ...