Tag
Literary Criticism
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If on a Winter’s Night a Reader…
We read to find ourselves. But what if, instead, we end up finding ourselves only in books? What if we can’t distinguish our life from those we read about? What if we stop trying to?
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The Writing “I” and the Reading “I”: Sheila Heti and the New Frontiers of the Personal
In her latest, Sheila Heti embarks on an inverted Oulipian experiment, producing content in a fundamentally unrestricted manner.
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What Do the PDFs Say about This?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow
“What are the systems of power in this fictional context andthe story world I’m making? What are the stakes? What are the values?”
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It’s Not Only Human Stories Worth Telling: Sigrid Nunez’s Animal Novels
Why are animals so central to Sigrid Nunez’s thinking about the status of fiction?
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Interpret or Judge?: John Guillory on the Future of Literary Criticism
“‘Professing criticism’ is a contradiction and maybe even an impossibility. I’d like to hope that it’s not, that it’s just an innovation, historically.”
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A Translation the Size of the World
“Translators and writers must fight through the “labyrinth of [the] imagination,” find their way through their private language toward a text’s new picture of reality.”
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Phantoms of Patriarchy: On Ditlevsen & Bachmann
Revival fetishism perpetuates the gendered dynamics of authorship and reception that Tove Ditlevsen and Ingeborg Bachmann spent their lives writing about and against.
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Life inside the Fiction Factory: Dan Sinykin on Conglomerate Publishing
“An author’s photo is more appealing to the consumer than the publisher’s colophon.”
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Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
“When you call a book ‘autofiction,’ you released yourself from the responsibility of actually looking at what the book is doing.”
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Did the College Admissions Essay Remake Literature?
Is the college admissions essay (CAE) a useful tool for understanding ongoing transformations in literature, academia, and publishing?
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“Gestures of Refusal”: A Conversation with Sarah Bernstein and Daisy Lafarge
“Why do we want our characters to be innocent, as if we are innocent ourselves?”
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The Text: Do Not Disturb
Does loving a work of literature mean seizing it? How should critics feel about their feelings toward a text?
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Stop Reading like a Critic
Think about your favorite book. Now ask yourself: Would you admit this to others? Most would share—but literature professors are not most people.
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The Crumbling Tower
Academics are scrambling to fulfill the increasingly bureaucratic research measures of the neoliberal university.
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Public Thinker: Nancy K. Miller on Feminist Lives
“Although I was reluctant to generalize about women’s friendship, I was also thinking about a model that would counter the male model of friendship.”
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We Other Victorians
The late 19th and early 21st centuries share a common loss of technological innocence.
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The House That Form Built
Across the slatted border between the United States and Mexico, near Ciudad Juárez, the artists Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello recently installed several …
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In the Moment, On the Edge
What was literary impressionism? It is not an easy question to answer, since literary impressionism was less a movement than a sensibility. The impressionist writer …
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Reading Lives, Writing Lives
My tiny captor sleeps beside me. I don’t know how long it will last, but I welcome such moments of respite. Stolen hours to write, periods in which I feel my foggy …
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Carolyn Heilbrun Told You So
Over the course of a few weeks in April, amid the usual tiny indignities that beset women in academe, I read through Carolyn Heilbrun’s entire oeuvre. April …
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The Material Life of Criticism
Three new histories of literary study draw attention to the critic’s material life. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, by Joseph North, Paraliterary …
