The role of the critic isn’t to summarize or repackage art, but to actively participate in a conversation about it.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Literary studies investigate texts through a range of approaches that span traditional close reading and critical theory to modern computational, cognitive, and interdisciplinary methodologies. The ...