Enjoy an audio version of this article. T. S. Eliot’s essay “The Function of Criticism” (1923) is a work of angry intelligence: it reads as if it were written under duress. Apparently Eliot would ...

A s a precocious child in the early 1940s, the American philosopher Richard Rorty became a connoisseur of exotic flowers. His passion sent him hunting for wild orchids in the mountains of northwestern ...

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 “ambitious” — ...

IT is not so long ago that the field of literary criticism was divided into two opposing camps. France being the only country in the world where criticism is a serious matter, the battle waged most ...

The scene: a graduate seminar in literature sometime in the eerily becalmed days of the mid-1990s, when for an aspirant to an academic job, the future seemed poised to break in one of two ...

What if every book was worth reading? Not just the books with silver medallions on their covers, but every hardcover featured at Barnes & Noble, every paperback foisted upon you by a friend or a ...

I WANT to talk about the historical interpretation of literature — that is, about the interpretation of literature in its social, economic, and political aspects. To begin with, it will be worth while ...