If the name of the course “Electronic Critique Lab: Necromedia and Posthumanity” doesn’t leave you scratching your head, get this: It’s a required part of an interdisciplinary program at the ...

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 ...

Provides a basic skills course designed to equip students to handle the English major. Emphasizes critical writing and the acquisition of basic techniques and vocabulary of literary criticism through ...

“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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...