It’s always risky to make predictions, especially optimistic ones; but I’ve noticed that one of the salutary debates emerging in the new century regarding literary studies -- and by extension the ...

After 40 years of teaching literature, Elaine Showalter has written a book that inspires the conversation about teaching literary studies. "Teaching Literature," published last December by Blackwell ...

I teach comparative literature at Columbia University. At the start of every semester, if I plan to discuss one of my own novels in class, I always tell my new students an old story about writing and ...

G iven the collapse of the job market, the casualization of labor, the contraction of humanities departments, and the dismantling of tenure, is it possible to celebrate — earnestly and passionately — ...

Northwestern’s artists-in-residence work with aspiring students in their fields. Non-fiction writer Eula Biss became a finalist for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award in the criticism ...

In The American Scholar, Mark Edmundson makes the modest proposal that professors of literature should teach literature: Word is out on the street: the study of literature is dying; English is ...

READERS of Balzac’s Une Fille d’Ève will recall his description of the depressing education given by the Countess de Granville to her two young daughters. That she might make smooth their path to ...

Recently I asked three of my teen-aged great nephews about the last time they’d been assigned to read books written by black authors at their schools. All three answered with a resounding: “never.” ...

When 1st Lt. Max Adams was deployed to Iraq in 2002, he took with him a 20-pound hardback edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Sometimes he would read from it to his soldiers—speeches ...