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 […]
Tag Archives: formalism
Does Lit Crit Make Lit Less Fun?
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Feminism, ideology, John Keats, Marxism, New Criticism Comments closed
Invisible Man & Lolita Changed the ’50s
Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and Nabokov’s “Lolita” both challenged basic 1950s assumptions. The former changed public perceptions on what it meant to be black while the latter violated a tacit agreement not to go digging under neatly manicured lawns bordered by white picket fences.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged 1950s, aestheticism, Hans Robert Jauss, horizon of expectations, Invisible Man, Lolita, modernism, Ralph Ellison, reception theory, Richard Wright, social protest novel, Vladimir Nabokov Comments closed
Textualist Judges Out of Control
Textualist judges committed the same mistake as formalists in ruling against federal subsidies for citizens who signed up for Obamacare in the federal exchanges.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Andrew Marvell, Hamlet, Obamacare, textualism, To His Coy Mistress, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Arguing against Lit for Lit’s Sake
Nabokov’s aestheticism in the 1960s tried to separate literature from history.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged aestheticism, New Criticism, New Historicism, Vladimir Nabokov Comments closed
