Finally, the New York Times has caught up with the next dubious trend in English literature departments: neuroscience. As Patricia Cohen writes, "Zealous enthusiasm for the politically charged and ...

It has held sway in the humanities for nearly four decades, surviving even the great culture wars. But it is being used in surprising ways. Either literary theory is dead, or it’s invincible. It all ...

One of the momentous developments in criticism in the past two decades has been the revival of the historical method as a way of studying literature, the arts, and the world of ideas. Scholars who ...

Anyone who has taught a college literature course has likely heard a student say, “Can’t I just enjoy the book?” This frustration with literary theory is common. Many undergraduates feel that theory ...

For at least a half-century, scholars have been adopting literary approaches to the New Testament inspired by certain branches of literary criticism and theory. In this book, Michal Beth Dinkler uses ...

I preface this piece with the fact that I am not a journalism major. Outside of The Oracle, the only journalism class I’ve ...

Fredric Jameson, professor of romance studies, Knut Schmidt Nielsen distinguished professor of comparative literature and director of the Institute for Critical Theory, is remembered for his ...

In his latest book, Microsoft software developer turned literature professor Dennis Yi Tenen takes us all the way back to 17th-century apps for a deep dive into computer science and literature’s ...

I opened Dennis Yi Tenen’s slim new volume, “Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write,” expecting to be irritated. It was the subtitle, “How Computers Learned to Write,” that worried ...

This course introduces students to a wide range of critical theories that English majors need to know. We’ll begin with some basic questions about literary texts: How can we understand documents from ...