"Literary Criticism" Blogs & Blog Posts

When you’re assigned to read a text, you’re supposed to take away some big-picture ideas. To get to that broad understanding, though, you should use a method that is all about being detail-oriented. It’s called “close reading,” and it will...

In his memoir A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway recalled the time that he and his pal, Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald, were talking about their dongs. (Excerpted text from Faded Page) In the time after Zelda had what was then called her...

Paul Di Filippo has written a masterful, lively history of the many ways in which science fiction has explored the collapse of the American project, from JA Mitchell's 1889 The Last American to contemporary novels like Too Like the Lightning, Liberat...

Sarah Jeong continues her brilliant, obsessive tear through the Star Wars canon (here's yesterday's post on the difficulties of the Warsverse's storage media and IT systems), this time looking at the outsized role that the lack of obstetric care play...

Is "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" actually about psychedelic drugs, British colonialism, or penis envy? Depends who you ask. At the BBC, Hephzibah Anderson surveys 150 years of weird readings of Lewis Carroll's classic book. From Anderson's essay...

So Jonathan Franzen is doing kind of a weird thing in the early going of Purity, his latest novel. He’s not the first author to do a version of this weird thing, but the particular way he’s doing it, at least so far, made me want to write about i...

If you are a woman or a person of color or both (as are many of us here at Jezebel, as is feminist darling Roxane Gay), your default experience of the internet is likely to be one of harassment. But for others, namely a certain set of writers who ove...