In Part One of this essay, I introduced the Balzan Prize for Humanity, Peace and Fraternity among Peoples, along with Hannah Arendt’s involvement in the potential selection of the 1963 prize winner. I highlighted that her correspondence with Dan Jacobson and Karl Jaspers regarding potential nominees...

On August 18, 1963, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) described in a letter to Dan Jacobson (1929-2014), a South African writer residing in London, what she believed was “the greatest difference between South Africa and the [United] States.” She had just returned from a rejuvenating vacation in Europe, only...

On "the inspiring resistance that the [Middle Ages] imposes on us, and the hermeneutic difficulty—maybe even the impossibility—of accessing medieval culture."

Any genealogy of the postcritical undertaken in 2015 should map not just the personal experiences and dispositional idiosyncrasies that have led us to our current procedures as individual readers and thinkers. It should also plot those individual stories within a larger institutional narrative of critical activity in the American academy.

Much has been made of the fact that “critique,” as practiced in literary criticism, is an attitude. But critique is also an argument. If there are so many problems with the assumption that literary form represents an imaginative solution to real contradictions, then why do so many people find it so compelling? Why do the problems seem both surmountable and worth surmounting?