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The H. P. Lovecraft Studies Weblog Event Horizon Books: SF, Horror, and Fantasy The WebLife of John W. Anderson John Crowley: A Pictorial Bibliography Dr Sleep's DOOM Apothecary Email joh…

518 - Mapping Bloomsday | Strange Maps | Big Think

Hamlet and the region of death - The Boston Globe For as long as anyone can remember, the basic task of literary scholarship has been close reading. Sit down with a book, pencil in hand, read, pay attention — and then tell the world what you no…

The reason there are starlings in North America? Shakespeare. On March 6, 1890, a New York pharmaceutical manufacturer named Eugene Schiefflin released 60 starlings into Central Park, following his plan to introduce every species of bird mentioned in Shakespeare into the New World. Those 60 birds swelled to over 200 million birds today, and they have wrought havoc on our public buildings as well as on our agriculture.*

Open Source Shakespeare: search Shakespeare's works, read the texts Other Shakespeare-related sites…

Conan - Red Nails : Robert E. Howard : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Genome Biology | Full text | A Faustian bargain Genome Biology 2010, 11:138 doi:10.1186/gb-2010-11-10-138…

The Project Gutenberg eBook of All Things Considered, by G. K. Chesterton. I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers u…

Genealogy of Influence Genealogy of Influence is a dataset of influence links between historic figures started in 2005. I added the data to the database project Freebase where others have added thousands of connections. So…

Mary Lamb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Mary Anne Lamb (3 December 1764 – 20 May 1847), was an English writer, the sister and collaborator of Charles Lamb.…

Voltaire's Candide : Online Exhibitions

HAROLD BLOOM - PART 1 - Vice Magazine

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HTMLGIANT / X-Mas Present: Everything You Always Wanted to Ask David Gates About Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories…

The Millions: The Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far): An Introduction Who says lit coverage can't survive online? Learn about 5 Amazingly Easy Ways to Support The Millions…

CABINET // Reading to the Endgame

The Uncollected Stories of JD Salinger Home …

For anyone with at least a passing interest in literary studies, Mark Bauerlein's Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research is worth consideration. He identifies a real problem, but puts the emphasis on the wrong cause, and suggests the wrong solutions.

Personally, I believe the critic should place the literary work in question before himself and his critical perspective, which is not to claim that I've never engaged in critical sophistry or the application of a novel critical approach purely for the sake of its novelty. That such endeavors are, as Bauerlein puts it, "a professional game, a means of finding something more to say" should be obvious to anyone who has been a serious humanities student at any point during the last fifty years, but does not make them entirely without value. There is a vanishingly small chance that the ten-thousandth analysis of Hamlet may say something new and true about the play; some may deem even such a faint possibility sufficient justification for the pursuit, but it's not the main point. Just as young lions and bears learn adult skills through play, so do humanities students. Second, the wide application of experimental critical approaches on familiar works winnows and refines them, so that some (perhaps a very few) of those experimental approaches mature to the point where they can be usefully employed along side established critical tools. Think of it as the application of an experimental scientific technique in a controlled laboratory setting.

Bauerlein errs seriously in recommending a reduction humanities research as a solution to this problem. That students and newly christened professionals play with well known subjects is no problem at all. The problems is that, as they mature professionally, they have little incentive to turn their critical skills to new works.

Bauerlein says, "I don't know how much the situation obtains in other fields, but I assume that it is so in film, art history, philosophy." He's wrong. Professional film critics write about new films. Professional art critics write about new art. They avoid what Bauerlein describes as the overproduction of scholarly goods by setting their analytical skill to work outside constrained territory of canon. It's true that no one reads literary criticism, but they do read film criticism. The audience reads films criticism because they don't understand or don't know how to appraise new films. Film critics have a readership because of the works they choose to critique—new films. Films critics argue with each other because they apply their critical attention to topics in genuine dispute. Is it any wonder literary critics don't have an audience when they ignore subject matter that most commands the attention of readers? Tell us things we want to know or don't fully understand about books published this year!

English departments and scholarly publications need to incentivize risk taking by humanities professionals. If critics turn their attention to new works, their criticism will receive attention in return. Perhaps more humanities professors would be more "happy with the productivity mandate" if they stood to gain professionally by expanding human knowledge and understanding rather than rehashing familiar works with new buzz words.