J onathan Kramnick’s book Criticism and Truth is more modest than its title suggests. Essentially an apologia for the nuts-and-bolts work of literary studies, it is best described not as “ambitious” — ...

Did Kenneth Burke, intellectual maverick, accidentally create cultural studies? At the age of 20, Kenneth Burke left academic life for good; or so he thought. “It is now time for me to quit college,” ...

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. By Jennifer Schuessler Thirty ...

In this spirited if esoteric outing, Yale University English professor Kramnick (Paper Minds) mounts a granular defense of literary criticism as a method for making sense of the world. “Close reading ...

Of the character sketches that the English satirist Samuel Butler wrote in the mid-seventeenth century—among them “A Degenerate Noble,” “A Huffing Courtier,” “A Small Poet,” and “A Romance Writer”—the ...

The scene: a graduate seminar in literature sometime in the eerily becalmed days of the mid-1990s, when for an aspirant to an academic job, the future seemed poised to break in one of two ...

Perhaps, you may have caught a glimpse of me milling around campus these past few weeks. If so, you would likely have noticed my trendsetting new accessory: a rotund, corpulent book. If you were ...

Last winter, the 37-year-old literary critic and Wesleyan professor Merve Emre stood in front of a microphone in Rachel Comey's Soho boutique. The New York Review of Books was celebrating its new ...

https://doi.org/10.5325/style.53.2.0257 • https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.53.2.0257 Copy URL JIE ZHANG is Associate Professor of English at Anhui Normal ...