A collection of 49 posts
The discipline of English literature seems unlikely to survive the coming technological tsunami—and maybe it doesn’t deserve to. And I say this as a professor of English, who believes in the power of the written word.
Othello and Iago represent two enduring behaviours whose conflicts have shaped much of humanity’s theory of mind and moral emotions to the present day.
Our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by digital technology. This is stripping us of our sense that the physical landscape is infused with meaning.
Dostoevsky, Alice Munro, and the nature of fiction—what does our inability to forgive do to our ability to confess?
The history of utopian fiction proves that we can’t even imagine a better world.
Today, most of John Braine’s work is out of print and forgotten. But he was an underrated writer, unafraid to confront the complexities of masculine sexuality with terse precision, self-deprecation, and emotional candour.
Attending to Shakespeare on his own terms may allow us to reclaim the erotic warmth that is latent in our human condition.
1900–1950 was a golden age of literary eccentricity.
In his latest novel, Tom Piazza imagines the finest meeting of American minds never to have happened.
Philosophies of human cruelty, from Sade to October 7th.
Human beings need meaning, and a life in which all one’s needs were met by external agents would fail to provide it.
An Interview with Saul Bellow’s biographer Zachary Leader.
The Western canon was not an unchanging set of texts, but an ongoing conversation that lasted thousands of years—enabling each generation to build on the intellectual heritage of the past.
Few writers in our time were more committed to the novel or had more idealism about the heights the form could scale.
More than six centuries after The Canterbury Tales first appeared, the Wife of Bath still has lessons to teach about love, sex, marriage, and—yes—feminism