Tag
Literary Criticism
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The Translator’s Dilemma: Thinking Versus Doing?
Would we get a different view of translation if we turned to translators themselves?
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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 …
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#Academoji
“When you just send me a text full of emojis, it is so easy to dismiss you … A panda next to a gun next to a wrapped gift? It makes no sense!” So Ray admonishes Shoshanna’s use of emojis in the season 2 premiere of Girls, clearly missing the power of the tiny icons…
