In The Use and Abuse of Literature, Marjorie Garber crafts a defense of humanistic thinking and literary study in a way that both address contemporary questions about the field while invoking almost old-fashioned answers.

While not as innately pleasurable to read as her most famous book, Shakespeare After All, The Use and Abuse of Literature is informative and oddly captivating. I say "oddly" because there is a distinctively disjointed, discursive quality to the writing itself; her arguments, suc...