After 40 years of teaching literature, Elaine Showalter has written a book that inspires the conversation about teaching literary studies. "Teaching Literature," published last December by Blackwell ...

Contrary to headlines claiming “The End of the English Major,” Hart is proud to say that enrollments at Columbia “are higher ...

I teach comparative literature at Columbia University. At the start of every semester, if I plan to discuss one of my own novels in class, I always tell my new students an old story about writing and ...

In The American Scholar, Mark Edmundson makes the modest proposal that professors of literature should teach literature: Word is out on the street: the study of literature is dying; English is ...

G iven the collapse of the job market, the casualization of labor, the contraction of humanities departments, and the dismantling of tenure, is it possible to celebrate — earnestly and passionately — ...

When 1st Lt. Max Adams was deployed to Iraq in 2002, he took with him a 20-pound hardback edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Sometimes he would read from it to his soldiers—speeches ...

Northwestern’s artists-in-residence work with aspiring students in their fields. Non-fiction writer Eula Biss became a finalist for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award in the criticism ...

Recently I asked three of my teen-aged great nephews about the last time they’d been assigned to read books written by black authors at their schools. All three answered with a resounding: “never.” ...