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Tag Archives: Literary Criticism
Classrooms and Correctness
David Denby discusses his book Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World.
Stanley Fish discusses his new book, Professional Correctness, which is an account of literary studies and political change.
The Death of Satan
Literary scholar Andrew Delbanco [NHC Fellow 1990-91, 2002-03] discusses his book, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. Delbanco explains the ways Americans have conceptualized and described evil in political, cultural, and literary terms from the 16th to the 20th centuries and concludes by discussing the future of the devil in American culture.
Literary Lives
A discussion of contemporary literary criticism and the common reader. David Ellis discusses his contribution to a new three-volume biography of the British writer, D. H. Lawrence.
African Americans Part 4
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., discusses his book, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Oxford University Press). Arnold Rampersad discusses his biography of Langston Hughes, available from Oxford University Press.
Theory and Practice
Myra Jehlen and Paul Hunter discuss the impact of theory on modern literary scholarship and criticism. Shannon Ravenel discusses her work as editor of The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties (Houghton Mifflin).
Story and Song
Eudora Welty sits for an interview at the National Humanities Center
Helen Vendler‘s recent books include Voices and Visions: American Poets (Random House) and The Music of What Happens: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (Harvard University Press).
Eudora Welty‘s recent books include One Writer’s Beginnings (Warner Books, 1985).
Posted in Episodes
Tagged Literary Criticism, Literature, Novelist, Poetry, Pulitzer Prize
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Foreign Subjects: Languages and God in the Schools
Rosemary Feal and Joan Hinde Stewart dicuss foreign languages in American education–what’s popular, what’s not, teaching methods, and literary criticism and theory. Warren Nord and Ronald Sharp talk about the perils and rewards of teaching religion in American schools.
Uncommon Readers
David Daiches is the author of more than 30 books of literary history and criticism. He’s at work on a forthcoming study of the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on the founders of the United States.
The Rise of the Novel
According to Paul Hunter and Patricia Meyer Spacks, English fiction rose to prominence in the 18th-century at about the same time that autobiography became important in England’s cultural life, reflecting an interest on the part of the common reader in everyday life and in the concept of self. Early English novels were enormously popular, but they were also the object of sometimes harsh criticism. For example, the English author and lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, declared that readers of novels were the young, the ignorant, and the idle.
Literary Inquiry Today Part 2
The English writer Thomas de Quincey said that All that is literature seeks to communicate power, all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge. Does de Quincey’s aphorism apply to literary creation and criticism today? According to George Steiner, the contemporary literary spotlight rests not so much upon the creators of literature–the poets, playwrights, and novelists–as upon critics and commentators. Why is this so? Is this good or bad?
Literary Inquiry Today Part 1
Does literature matter in everyday life? Beyond issues in formal education, how do literary creation and criticism relate to concerns and questions in politics and popular culture? By way of discussing the evolution of the American literary canon, the changing methods of literary criticism, and comments on her own feminist literary perspectives, Annette Kolodny offers some answers to those questions.
Women’s Literary Studies Part 2
As a recent political development attests, feminism is measurable by various yardsticks, among them cultural and literary criticism. What are some of the implications of feminism for the production and study of literature, in both historical and contemporary terms? Keywords: George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Loisa May Alcott, feminist criticism
Women’s Literary Studies Part 1
What is feminist literary criticism? What are its premises, and how does it differ from other forms of literary study? Is literature marked by gender?
The Art of Literary Biography Part 3
Professor Martin discusses the writing of his book Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford University Press, 1980). What sort of evidence contributes to the writing of literary biography? Is it desirable or necessary for a literary biographer in his subject to disengage the life from the work? To what extent should the writing of literary biography involve psychological analysis? At what point in literary biography do chronicle and criticism diverge or cojoin?
Afro-American Culture, Literature, and Social Order Part 6
Professor Baker, who holds the Albert M. Freenfield Chair in Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of a forthcoming book, The Afro-American Matrix, an examination of the blues, ideology, and the study of literature, criticism, and culture in America. What are the blues? Why is this peculiarly Afro-American form of cultural expression important to both black and white Americans today?