Most Read This Week In Literary Criticism

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.

Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory, or conversely from book reviewing, is a matter of some controversy. For example, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary thinking and Criticism draws no distinction between lit ...more

Most Read This Week Tagged "Literary Criticism"

Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King

Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature

Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

Bad Indians Book Club: Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds

Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief

To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other

We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine

Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time

Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction

Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane

On James Baldwin (The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities at Brandeis University)

Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World

All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess

Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius

Banned Books: The World's Most Controversial Books, Past and Present

The Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son and 'The Tradition of Versification in Old English'

Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power

A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing

Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times

Origins of The Wheel of Time: The Legends and Mythologies that Inspired Robert Jordan

The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings

To Write as if Already Dead (Rereadings)

The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination

Steeped in Stories: Timeless Children’s Novels to Refresh Our Tired Souls

Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life

A Hitch in Time: Writings from the London Review of Books

Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation

The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien's Creation

Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy

William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love: Art, Poetry, and the Imagining of a New World

Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare

Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right

Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

No Judgment: Essays – Trenchant Cultural Critique on Technology, Celebrity, and Contemporary Life

Indigiqueerness: A Conversation about Storytelling

Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative

Great Short Books: A Year of Reading―Briefly

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells

Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation

Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece

Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader

From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with My Nine-Year-Old Self

Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark

She Speaks!: What Shakespeare's Women Might Have Said

Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling

Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry

Classics of Horror: Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading

Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers

Literary Journeys: Mapping Fictional Travels across the World of Literature

Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927–28

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Quotes Tagged “Literary Criticism”

“ Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it. The two principles work in covert concert; though in most of us Eros dominates, in none of us is Thanatos completely subdued. However-and this is the paradox of suicide-to take one's life is to behave in a more active, assertive, Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it. The two principles work in covert concert; though in most of us Eros dominates, in none of us is Thanatos completely subdued. However-and this is the paradox of suicide-to take one's life is to behave in a more active, assertive, "erotic" way than to helplessly watch as one's life is taken away from one by inevitable mortality. Suicide thus engages with both the death-hating and the death-loving parts of us: on some level, perhaps, we may envy the suicide even as we pity him. It has frequently been asked whether the poetry of Plath would have so aroused the attention of the world if Plath had not killed herself. I would agree with those who say no. The death-ridden poems move us and electrify us because of our knowledge of what happened. Alvarez has observed that the late poems read as if they were written posthumously, but they do so only because a death actually took place. "When I am talking about the weather / I know what I am talking about," Kurt Schwitters writes in a Dada poem (which I have quoted in its entirety). When Plath is talking about the death wish, she knows what she is talking about. In 1966, Anne Sexton, who committed suicide eleven years after Plath, wrote a poem entitled "Wanting to Die," in which these startlingly informative lines appear: But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. When, in the opening of "Lady Lazarus," Plath triumphantly exclaims, "I have done it again," and, later in the poem, writes, Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call, we can only share her elation. We know we are in the presence of a master builder. ...more ”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

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“ I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see. ”
― Dorothy Parker

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