J onathan Kramnick’s book Criticism and Truth is more modest than its title suggests. Essentially an apologia for the nuts-and-bolts work of literary studies, it is best described not as “ambitious” — ...

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 ...

John Guillory’s “Cultural Capital,” published amid the 1990s canon wars, became a classic. In a follow-up, “Professing Criticism,” he takes on his field’s deep funk. By Jennifer Schuessler Thirty ...

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 ...

Should literary criticism be an art or a science? A surprising amount depends on the answer to that question. If you’re an English major, what should you study: the idiosyncratic group of writers who ...

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 ...

This foundational course provides a thorough introduction to theatre and drama study. It is geared towards, though not limited to, theatre majors (or prospective majors) in their first year. Dramatic ...