Robbins quotes and interprets opportunistically ... to a review Robbins wrote several years ago of Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. He’s sharply critical ...

Should literary criticism be an art or a science ... (Louis Menand’s article about Paul de Man, in this week’s magazine, quotes the critic Peter Brooks, who recalls how de Man could ...

Literary analysis, after all, is not like building houses, feeding people, or practising medicine. Even compared to its sister disciplines in the humanities (e.g., history or philosophy ...

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 ...

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 ...

Lovers of long-form literary criticism have a little less to lament today. The Nation is bringing Bookforum back from the dead. Six months after the beloved literary magazine Bookforum announced ...