The literary-critical marketplace now suffers social media as a necessary side street at the very least, if not a central forum. As a result, it has adopted some of the latter’s methods of preference ...

Anyone who has taught a college literature course has likely heard a student say, “Can’t I just enjoy the book?” This frustration with literary theory is common. Many undergraduates feel that theory ...

This month, our own Andrea Long Chu published Authority, a collection of her work across New York Magazine, n+1, and other publications. It includes two new essays on the state and history of ...

T here’s a conservative turn happening in literary studies, although it hasn’t received much public attention. Those involved certainly haven’t banded together under a banner. In literature ...

Lauren Oyler and literary criticism in the age of the Internet. In No Judgment, the novelist and critic explores the perilous activity of literary criticism in the era of social media. Like many great ...

The invention of close reading. By transforming quotations into evidence, close reading served as way to turn postwar criticism into a specialized knowledge. But what if we treated it more as an art ...

Genres are the Sirens of literary criticism. They seem friendly and alluring, but they are dangerously elusive shape-shifters. You really have to lash yourself to the mast. There is also the problem ...

Several staff members and a publisher of the prestigious volunteer-run magazine resigned over the essay by Joanna Chen. (JTA) — Amid criticism from staff members and others, a prestigious literary ...

The decision by the free expression group came after intense criticism of its response to the war in Gaza. A wave of participants had pulled out of the festival in protest. By Jennifer Schuessler The ...

When I think of Dorothy Parker’s hangovers, and I do, the image that comes to mind is that of the U.S.S. Arizona. A sunken battleship resting at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, the Arizona is slowly ...

“Literary criticism is often seen as indispensable to intellectual life, perhaps because the form matches the content. (An essay about literature is itself literature.) And dance critics and their ...