On Writers and Writing” gathers 21 pieces by the great author, including a confident critique of Dickens when James was just 22 ...

Scott McLemee reviews Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies. In 1966, Roland Barthes published a short book—a pamphlet, really—called Criticism and Truth, in response ...

North’s analysis is a tour de force demonstration of what close reading can do and why it would be a tragedy to ever give it up. This rewriting of the goals of literary criticism has had far ...

We shall not otherwise write literary criticism at all, but merely social or political history as reflected in literary texts, or psychological case histories from past eras, or, to take the ...

Darwinian literary criticism would be nothing if not realistic. Given the existence of a fundamental, wide-ranging scientific understanding of life in general ...

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 ...

THERE are five groups interested in literary criticism: publishers of books, authors, publishers of reviews, critics, and, finally, the reading public. An obvious interest of all the groups but ...

In ordinary literary criticism—the kind that splits the difference between art and science—there is a give-and-take between the general and the particular.

Literary criticism has been routinely lambasted for its niceness, its lack of intellectual rigor, and its mediocrity. n+1’s first issue took on The Believer, which “[differed] in at least one ...

In ENGL 2102, Literary Analysis, we will read, discuss, and write about a variety of literary genres and forms: poetry, drama, and fiction. In all our reading and work together, we will focus on the ...