This article appears in the March 6/13, 2023 issue. Illustration by Tim Robinson. The scene: a graduate seminar in literature sometime in the eerily becalmed days of the mid-1990s, when for an ...

Literary study “has a contribution to make” to that process, which happens “unintentionally and collectively in the university,” he said. But it can’t take most of the credit (or blame).

John Guillory is well-known within literary study for his 1993 book Cultural Capital, which argued that academics were wrong to wage political battles through the texts they included on their ...

John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, out in January from the University of Chicago Press, promises to be a landmark in the study of higher ...

Literary artifacts (poems, novels, and other playthings of the élite) could be replaced as objects of study by pop-culture ones (Taylor Swift, selfies, and other playthings of the masses).

Looking at literary works rather than individual copies, the researchers found that 68 percent (799 out of around 1,170 stories) likely survived to the present.