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 ...

Here are some quotes to help you think about criticism: giving it, receiving it, and understanding it. 1. “Don’t be distracted by criticism. Remember, the only taste of success some people ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...