Literary Criticism and Its Caricatures A new book defends the political power of the critic. It falls short. The Review | Essay. By Justin Sider February 8, 2023.

Scott McLemee reviews Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies. In 1966, Roland Barthes published a short book—a pamphlet, really—called Criticism and Truth, in response ...

Literary criticism may have to be de-professionalized before its practitioners will allow themselves to openly embrace aesthetic judgment or to speak in the voice of the lay reader once more.

John Guillory’s “Cultural Capital,” published amid the 1990s canon wars, became a classic. In a follow-up, “Professing Criticism,” he takes on his field’s deep funk.

Cultural Capital may have been a final witness to one kind of literary criticism, stable as it once was; Professing Criticism is a witness to what is replacing it. 23.

" 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., ...

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 ...

But literary criticism seeks to go further than such self-referential statements of preference. Immanuel Kant pointed out in his Critique of Judgment that aesthetic judgments (of which literary ...

This class provides a survey of the field of literary criticism and theory from Antiquity to the present. Texts are drawn from a range of theoretical schools or movements, including formalism, ...