Category Archives: English

The English department at Columbia sits above Broadway, and in the late 1930s it has a problem named Lionel Trilling (1905-1975). The senior men confer. One of them tells the young instructor, with the courtesy of his class, that a … Continue reading →

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born February 24, 1942) stands among the defining literary theorists and philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a scholar whose work reshaped literary criticism, comparative literature, feminist theory, philosophy, the study of education, and … Continue reading →

Fredric Ruff Jameson (1934-2024) stands among the central figures of literary and cultural theory in the English-speaking world, and for more than half a century he labored to explain how the forms of art, architecture, film, and everyday culture register … Continue reading →

Homi K. Bhabha (b. November 1, 1949) is an Indian literary theorist and cultural critic whose work reshaped postcolonial studies by moving attention from fixed cultural identities toward the unstable, negotiated processes through which cultures meet and remake one another. … Continue reading →

Prose density is the amount of work each word and sentence does. Dense prose carries more meaning per unit of language than its length seems to allow. You read a short sentence and find it holds an argument, an image, … Continue reading →

Larry McEnerney teaches one core argument across all four Youtube transcripts. Writing in the adult world has nothing to do with what schools teach. Schools train you to write to teachers paid to read your work and assess you. Out … Continue reading →

Stephen Greenblatt was born on November 7, 1943, in Newton, Massachusetts, into a Jewish family with Litvak roots. His grandparents had emigrated from Lithuania in the 1890s to escape Czarist conscription. He grew up secular, but that heritage of displacement … Continue reading →