How does a novel entice or enlist us? How does a song surprise or seduce us? Why do we
bristle when a friend belittles a book we love, or fall into a funk when a favored TV series …

In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place
of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh …

Since the 1990s, literary and queer studies scholars have eschewed Marxist and
Foucauldian critique and hailed the reparative mode of criticism as a more humane and …

Teachers of literature make judgments about value. They tell their students which works are
powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange, or insightful—and thus, which are more worthy of …

This essay claims first that literary study's recent" method" conversations follow a binary
structure (depth vs. surface reading, post-critique vs. critique, paranoid vs. reparative …

An appeal for the importance of theory, utopia, and close consideration of our contemporary
dark times What does any particular theory allow us to do? What is the value of doing so …

SINYKIN• 463 ner hoped to profit from by the novel's publication. In his words, he wanted “to
figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by …

Listen to the interview with Anita Wohlmann about Metaphor in Illness Writing in New Books
Network here. Metaphor in Illness Writing argues that even when a metaphor appears …

BY VIRTUALLY any measure, Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) is the single most canonical
work of contemporary American fiction. 1 Pulitzer Prize winner, finalist for the National Book …

In his magnum opus Economy and Society, Max Weber offers two contrasting types, the
priest and the sorcerer, as the representative figures of religion and magic. The distinction …