Edmundson states that if he could make one wish for the members of his profession, college and university professors of literature, he would wish that for one year, two, three, or five, they would give up readings. By "a reading," he means the application of an analytical vocabulary to describe and (usually) to judge a work of literary art.…

It's the night before one of Javier Jimenez's big job interviews at the Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting. The 35-year-old graduate student, who is scheduled to earn his Ph.D. in comparative literature this spring from the University of California at Berkeley, is trying to ward off anxiety and abdominal pains. The mystique of the MLA, the…

The publication of Francois Cusset's "French Theory" raises a series of fascinating questions concerning the trans-Atlantic transmission and circulation of ideas. Most important, it impels everyone to inquire why for a time French thought managed to flourish in American universities while French intellectuals rapidly abandoned the entire…

Literary studies is in the doldrums. Wave after wave of revisionism has washed over literature departments in the last few decades, bringing a miscellany of new methods and critical tools, from cultural materialism to critical race theory, deconstruction to disability studies, the new historicism to the new formalism. Yet, even as people's ways of…

It is hard to imagine a world without books. Reading represents a mode of thinking and being that may be overshadowed in a contemporary world of web sites, movies, TV shows, CDs and video games. Ultimately, the author concludes that the percentage of serious readers has probably not changed significantly during the past century: what has changed…

In this article, the author describes Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities in Bogliasco, Italy, which offers a stately perch from which a few lucky scholars and artists can gaze at the Mediterranean and gather their thoughts making it so conducive to the study of arts and letters. The center provides scholars and artists midcareer and…

The major victory of professors of literature in the last half-century--the Great March from the New Criticism through structuralism, deconstruction, Foucauldianism, and multiculturalism--has been the invention and codification of a professionalized study of literature. They have made themselves into a priestly caste: To understand literature,…

Recently the author has been including in her undergraduate seminars Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Letter to d'Alembert on the Theatre" (1758), the most provocative essay on the arts ever written. It is about the unintended effects of theater--which, for Rousseau, stands in for all of the arts--on an audience. The essay is an impassioned rebuttal to…

This article talks about disciplinary fudging. The author points out that one fudges for complex and comprehensible reasons. However, she wonders at what point one becomes enough of an insider in a discipline to know how to gloss over the nuances of a complicated, inconvenient, or controversial topic.

"Creative nonfiction" is gaining ground as the descriptor for what has also been called "the fourth genre." The first word gives some people fits. They get all caught up in "creative" and assume it only means "invented." Instead of using "creative" as the qualifier, some call the genre "literary" or "narrative" nonfiction. Those are both…

In this article, the author discusses the importance of liberal arts education in the preparation of soldiers for war. He draws on his experiences teaching students from Army and Air Force ROTC programs and on Elizabeth D. Samet's book "Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature through Peace and War at West Point" to illuminate the purpose served by…

Last spring, the author distributed a survey to majors and minors in Hispanic studies at Connecticut College and at other schools to informally gather student attitudes toward the nature of Hispanic-studies courses as it pertained to their interests and goals. Although results were somewhat predictable, an unexpected finding was that of 148…

Epigrapher and philologist Bruce Zuckerman, directs an archive of photographs and other images of ancient biblical and related texts. By using sophisticated technical photography and computer graphics, he makes his photographs of ancient texts reveal more than a camera alone ever could. (MLW)

Describes how the Internet's power to make literary works freely accessible has led a "quiet bookworm" to challenge government and media industry giants before the U.S. Supreme Court in a copyright case. (EV)

A "Culture, Ideas, and Values" requirement with goals similar to those of an existing freshman program including works by women and minorities, will be initiated at Stanford University but without a fixed reading list. The faculty has been embroiled in debate for two years. (MLW)