The End of Literature
The rapid rise of “trigger warnings” is starting to impact literature curriculums. For instance, Columbia University students lobbied to include warnings on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a core text in Western Literature…
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literature
57 posts
The Rumpus Interview with Jay Rubin
Author and translator Jay Rubin talks about his new novel, The Sun Gods, translating Haruki Murakami into English, and the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II.
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Reading Don Quijote with My Mother
“That’s the anthem I would have sung at my original graduation if the university had stayed open,” my mother said.
Word of the Day: Didascalic
(adj.); intended to teach; related to teaching or education “How did it come to be … that ‘those of us for whom English is a line of work are also…
Brazil Strikes Back
Young Brazilian novelist Daniel Galera has just been translated into English for the first time. Over at the Globe and Mail, Chris Frey wonders if Blood-Drenched Beard will be a breakout moment for…
The Magic Building Where English Majors Work
A professor of undergraduate and graduate creative writing for twenty years, Cathy Day gives some practical advice for students at The Millions, admitting while English majors don’t work in a…
Drought-Stricken Literature
“And a new literature of drought may be emerging—one with room for stories that recall the past, but also for the possibility of trouble on a scale we’ve never seen…
Trigger Warning Literature
Requests by students at University of California Santa Barbara, Oberlin College, Rutgers University, University of Michigan, George Washington University, and other institutions for ““trigger warnings” on classroom literature has sparked…
Letterpress and Pictures, Literature and Art
Should art and literature be treated independently? The Paris Review Daily reports that the British Library has recently released an online collection of 1,200 Romantic and Victorian texts in the…
The Literary Novel is Dead! Long Live the Literary Novel!
It happens every now and then that we find someone toasting (or mourning) the death of the novel—this time, it’s Will Self’s turn. “How do you think it feels to…
A Parenthetical Suffering
According to Christopher Benfey, literature has a long history of writers including characters’ personal struggles in parentheses within the text. To learn how that worked in Nabokov’s “Lolita” or Virginia…
We All Contain Multitudes of Tacky
Ever droll, Sadie Stein writes in the Paris Review about the reaction we’re (all) prone to have when people recommend literature based on our professed likes and dislikes: When someone says I will like…