Q: You are widely recognized as one of the foremost Twain scholars in the field, and the trajectory of your career is indelibly entangled with Mark Twain and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in particular. While this expertise is clear in the simultaneous precision and capaciousness of the references...

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels capture how Lenù’s existence, rather than challenging mythologies of meritocracy as it should, mistakenly reaffirms that meritocracy functions well and that education might be a great equalizer, despite literary and historical realities that suggest otherwise.

To lawyers, at least, the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences represent techniques for determining, representing, measuring, and summing desire. 

The task of literary criticism must be to make the pure epiphanies of a text as obvious as possible—to learn Auerbach’s art of simplicity.

This chapter explores Hamlet's infamous dirty joke in light of the Q1 manuscript. 

Ross Knecht contends that critique is not solely and perhaps not even primarily negative in character: it also has an important synthetic function, uniting historical and interpretive modes of inquiry in such a way as to invest its objects of study with cultural and historical significance.

What would it mean to look down the barrel of criticism’s bleakest destinies and say, “who cares?” Anahid Nersessian groups the comic indifference of “who cares?” with cognate terms and phrases from other critics, whose work might join Sheila Heti’s to build a vocabulary for confronting auguries of obsolescence on something other than their own terms.

Sarah Tindal Kareem does not think that the English language possesses a good vocabulary for talking about the pleasures of readerly discomfort and difficulty: the feeling that one part of ourselves leaps ahead while another part lags behind. She finds that the reading experiences she most relishes are the ones in which agency is at once exercised and abdicated.

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.

One doesn’t need a metaphysics of history to sense when a form of life with its attendant rituals, pieties, and practices has grown old. Theory’s reign in literature departments has long been past the point when its claims arrived with salutary shock in the profession.