Tag Archives: New Criticism

The Bard Can Reopen the American Mind

Allan Bloom’s “Shakespeare’s Politics” (1964) argues that, through the Bard, we better understand politics.

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Why I Think the Way I Think

I survey my intellectual history, especially the evolution of my thinking about literature’s impact on human behavior.

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Does Lit Crit Make Lit Less Fun?

Friday My Ljubljana colleague Jason Blake alerted me to a Chronicle of Higher Education article that wrestles with the question of whether studying literature should be fun. It’s a fairly confused piece, with Baruch College’s Timothy Aubry conflating a number of issues better treated separately. Nevertheless, it’s worth a response because Aubry addresses questions that non-academics […]

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Detecting the Person behind the Poetry

What we find when we look for the person behind the literary work.

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Arguing against Lit for Lit’s Sake

Nabokov’s aestheticism in the 1960s tried to separate literature from history.

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Donne as an Aid to Teenage Angst

Well, the semester is underway.  Yesterday I began teaching one of my favorite classes, the early British Literature survey (Literature in History I).  Along with Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Wife of Bath, Doctor Faustus, Twelfth Night, King Lear, and Paradise Lost, I will be teaching the poetry of John Donne.  I […]

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Saving Poetry from English Teachers

Poetry used to play a much larger role in our culture than it does today.  That, at any rate, is the opinion of literary scholar Robert Scholes in his wonderfully provocative The Crafty Reader (Yale, 2001).  Scholes’ book is provocative in part because of where he puts the blame:  “I would like to suggest that […]

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