A Commonplace Blog

( 1 .) Literary theory was not a philosophical or critical “school,” because it did not arise from the articulation of specific theoretical ...

Practically everybody has a list of the year’s best books. Paper Cuts, the New York Times book blog, even compiled a list of the top ten t...

On Bloggingheads.tv, Todd Gitlin takes up the “interesting question of why there are so few conservatives in the academy, or at least in th...

Two recent pieces—an essay by Joseph Epstein in the Weekly Standard and a blog post by Miriam Burstein over at the Little Professor—have ...

Back from a week’s Thanksgiving vacation in California. Read a woeful 9/11 novel by Jess Walter called The Zero . My wife and I took the nie...

Nothing is more intellectually dishonest than pretending to talk about books in order to unfurl a political banner. Earlier today the Litera...

Literature is simply good writing—where “good” has, by definition, no fixed definition. What follows from this conclusion? First of all, li...

This elderly and baggy-fleshed word has caused no end of trouble. Originally, it meant grammar. Litteratura was the translation into Latin ...

Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country , which is both a middlebrow novel dressed up (or puffed up, as the case may be) to look like something m...

The National Book Awards will be announced tomorrow night. All of us high-culture types pretend to disdain them. Perhaps not entirely withou...

It is not entirely clear what is at stake or even at issue in the recent back-and-forth between Rohan Maitzen and Daniel Green . Both of th...

Everyone who reads novels as if they were his morning prayers has longtime favorites that he wants to press on his friends. I myself have to...

K. C. Johnson, the Brooklyn College historian whose Durham-in-Wonderland blog did so much to bring about justice in the “Duke rape case,” i...

Patrick Kurp, who is rapidly becoming my favorite literary blogger, has a quietly devastating post up at Anecdotal Evidence this morning, a...

Well, yesterday. The rise and fall of literary reputations, about which I wrote below, provoked my wonder. What books were being praised exa...

“In retrospect,” Frederick Crews wrote forty years ago in the Partisan Review , “it is easy to see that literary value in any given age has ...

When you come right down to it, literary interpretation (whatever else it is) is an effort to preserve a text from being used as a charter f...