criticism
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Revising ‘A Wrinkle in Time’
Irony abounds in a story from The Chronicle of Higher Education about Jonathan Gottschall, the pioneering figure of Literary Darwinism, who has taken to MMA fighting since his career as an academic foundered. Gottschall made a splash in literary circles with…
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Derrida Goes to Princeton
New Jersey is about to get Poststructural, thanks to Princeton’s recent acquisition of Jacques Derrida’s library. The collection contains nearly 14,000 books, many of which bear marginalia from the celebrated critic and philosopher. The collection will be available to scholars…
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Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry by William Logan
Zach Savich reviews William Logan’s Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetrytoday in Rumpus Poetry.
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Half a Century Later
Down at the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh asks where the black critics are (and whether we ever had any to begin with, and how the field is irrelevant until they come back): Sociologists who study black America have a name for…
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Criticising Criticism
The more all-encompassing art is becoming, the more we need criticism. The more books there are, the hungrier we are for a way to navigate the field. The more of other disciplines the visual arts take on – poetry, dance…
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Ban “Bravery” from Book Jackets
David Ulin at the LA Times makes interesting argument for retiring the word “brave” from jacket copy. Citing its overuse and the seeming dissonance of describing literature as brave in the face of countless acts of bravery in the world beyond…
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Always Read the Comments
Art isn’t just for fans, which means that it’s not just for the knowledgeable, but for passersby as well. Expertise, then, seems an excuse to make everyone talk about the same things in the same way. For the LA Review…
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Writing Workshops Defined
If you’re ready to join a writing workshop or you’re thinking about it, you’ll surely want to know what may happen to you while attending one. That’s why Amy Klein compiled on a handy glossary of commonly-uttered workshop criticisms along…
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Dr. Critic and Mr. Novelist
Can a good critic be a good novelist too? Daniel Mendelsohn and Leslie Jamison, who both have written both fiction and non-fiction, answer this question in the weekly Bookend column for the New York Times’s Sunday Review. Though their ideas differ, the…
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Gender, literature, and criticism
Women’s work has always been awesome, just as the work written by people of color, minorities, and other classes of people who aren’t white men has been. The work of white men has been awesome, too, but it has benefitted…
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The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Gilbert
This is how I think of it: there’s a contract between you and the mystery. And the mystery is the thing that brings life to the work.
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How Critics Affect Artists
An artist’s work can take years to complete, while a critic’s take on said art can be formulated in a matter of hours. This distinction is pointed out early on in Richard Brody’s discussion of criticism at The New Yorker. …