Everyone loves to hate school. Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly did. In Émile (1762), his treatise on the nature of education, he declared vociferously that he “hate[d] books” and that reading was the “curse of childhood.” The irony ...
Tag: Humanities
Public Thinker: Matthew Engelke on Thinking Like an Anthropologist
Matthew Engelke is one of the leading anthropologists of his generation ...
The Book Is a Time Machine
When we are not actually holding them, books are things over which we like to wring our hands. They stand, in their very solidity, for what might be precarious ...
Editor 2 Editor: Lindsay Waters and Peter J. Dougherty
What does it take for a scholarly book to reach a broad audience? What should ...
How to Predict a Bestseller
Literary theory is not a field that creates many bestsellers. Biographies of Shakespeare will always have a market, and now and then a work like Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae rides a wave of ...
Against Careerism, For College
Having just seen a new crop of students graduate from my university, and seeing them now off into the world—to jobs, internships, and further study—I find myself thinking about what college is for ...
Public Picks 2016
Finals have been graded, graduates have been feted, and the days are still getting longer. That means one thing: time to start planning your summer reading! Each year around this time, the editorial ...
“Democracy and Education” at 100
The rallies during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign feature exuberant call-and-response exchanges. Denouncing immigrants from south of the border, Trump shouts, “We’re going to build a wall ...
Show Me Where It Hurts: Part 1
Illness, mental and physical, is arguably comics’ invisible master theme, deeply woven into their genome and shaping the stories they tell, from the earliest newspaper strips (chronic allergies in ...
Stop Hyping Academic Freedom
Universities may be among the oldest of our institutions, but they have changed significantly during the millennium or so since they were established. Roughly speaking, the history of the European ...
Shakespeare Off the Grid
Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Station Eleven, a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Fiction, depicts a world radically depopulated by a vicious outbreak of superflu. A traveling ...
Translating the Untranslatable: An Interview with Barbara Cassin
Barbara Cassin is a French philosopher, translator, and theorist of translation. Trained as a philologist and philosopher specializing in ancient Greece, she is the director of research at the Centre ...
The Correctionists
One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis. —Karl Kraus For an American audience, the first reaction to the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project is presumably: who is Karl Kraus ...
Stop Defending the Humanities
Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them. I say this after having read widely across the rapidly accumulating literature in defense ...
Changes
The first thing that happens, when a literary historian starts using computers to think about literature, is that the object of study changes. Not just the tool; the object itself. “The objects ...