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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

“Criticism,” according to Northrop Frye, “is badly in need of an organizing principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Enjoy an audio version of this article. T. S. Eliot’s essay “The Function of Criticism” (1923) is a work of angry intelligence: it reads as if it were written under duress. Apparently Eliot would ...

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 ...