“He stops in the middle and just strums the rhythm…” Daniel Arizona remembers Buddy Holly. Christopher Guerin lists 46 authors who can be relied upon to produce a novel regularly every couple of years. There’s only one problem: “the list is pretty much the same as it was ten years ago.” And they’re all getting [...]
What should a writer notice; what can a critic contend? Sam Tanenhaus pits Updike against James Wood, which gets Wyatt Mason thinking: “as a form of argumentation, literary criticism is charged with making defensible cases for indefensible positions …” Okay, I like a good mean joke. All the same, it’s pretty dark to pick on [...]
At the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Britt Peterson revives Jonathan Gottschall’s Boston Globe essay “Measure for Measure,” which created a minor brouhaha a couple of months back. Gottschall’s essay argues that literary scholars ought to try out techniques that are informed by – and accountable to – the sciences. Peterson draws on this to highlight [...]
This is the third and last in my series on Jonathan Gottschall’s essay “Measure for Measure,” in which the author argues that literary studies ought to become more like the sciences. In my first post, I argued that Gottschall’s initial paragraphs establish qualities for litcrit to aspire toward – firmness, stability, durability – even though [...]
In the last post, I examined Jonathan Gottschall’s recent essay about integrating the aims, techniques and rigors of the sciences into the study of literature. I pointed out that in order to stage his argument clearly, Gottschall built two constellations of adjectives. The first described poor literary criticism … Theoretical, Speculative, Irrelevant, Wandering, Circuitous, Bending [...]
Jonathan Gottschall makes what is bound to be a controversial contribution to the ongoing discussion about how to bring focus to the field of literary studies – its purposes, methods and aims. This is a set of questions with which many writers struggle, often on purpose. In his article for the Boston Globe, Gottschall contributes [...]
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