Mary Poovey, a professor of English and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University, examines a parallel between the foundations of contemporary ...

I strain nowadays to read the so-called literary criticism by self-glorified critics. Their criticism — more of personal attacks — is puzzling! They have perfected the art of slamming everyone ...

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 ...

The literary-critical marketplace now suffers social media as a necessary side street at the very least, if not a central forum. As a result, it has adopted some of the latter’s methods of preference ...

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 ...

Smith College Professor Michael Thurston uncovers how one influential critic helped shape the early American literary landscape As difficult as it might be to believe today, there wasn’t much support ...

Anyone who has taught a college literature course has likely heard a student say, “Can’t I just enjoy the book?” This frustration with literary theory is common. Many undergraduates feel that theory ...

Lovers of long-form literary criticism have a little less to lament today. The Nation is bringing Bookforum back from the dead. Six months after the beloved literary magazine Bookforum announced its ...

In 1966, Roland Barthes published a short book—a pamphlet, really—called Criticism and Truth, in response to Raymond Picard, a distinguished professor and the biographer of the French classical ...

Literary critics, I tweeted, should not be allowed to write reviews of biography. I’d make a few exceptions, I thought, but not many. A tweeter responded: “Not for literary figures?” I retweeted with ...

In a sense, the decline of book reviews, like the decline of newspapers themselves, is a story about disaggregation.