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Take Chip Lambert, the struggling writer in Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections. Having lost his teaching job at a liberal arts college after a wild weekend of sex and drugs with a student, Chip moves to New York, acquires a leather wardrobe, pierces his ears, and gets to work on a revenge screenplay. Endlessly “grooming the corpse of a dramatically dead monologue,” even Chip knows the screenplay is a dog—but he nonetheless manages to convince himself that it’s his ticket to fame and fortune. Fortune, first and foremost, because Chip is so deeply in debt that he is reduced to ...

What is literature for? We should start owning our reading and asking more serious questions about what place literary education has in our collective life today. People are reading more during the pandemic. But it is wrong to think we are reading simply to escape a grim reality. Reading is more radical than we give it credit for. It always has been. What we do with its power is another matter.  Everyone seems to agree that reading is good for us, but we no longer, if we ever did, agree why and to what end. As an academic subject, English literature has always imagined itself as being goo...

Contrary to what many believe, James Joyce’s Ulysses is an ‘anti-stream of consciousness’ novel, JOHN SCHOLAR argues

It is an indictment of our theater that a playwright who has inspired artists across generations is so little known to the average theatergoer. Sadly, Adrienne Kennedy, the 89-year-old African American dramatic poet, whose 1964 play “Funnyhouse of a Negro” is a touchstone of 20th century American drama, is more revered than she is produced. Her name provokes rapturous tributes from other writers. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, one of the most talented dramatists to have emerged in the last 10 years, acknowledges the debt he and his contemporaries owe: “Every playwright writing today writes in ...

Eton (Shutterstock) The basic facts about George Orwell’s years at Eton are well known. But we don’t precisely know which Etonian values he retained and what influence the school had on his later life. John le Carré wrote me (on September 27, 1998), “I taught at Eton. It always amused me that Blair-Orwell, who had been to Eton, always took great pains to disown the place.”  Responding to Twentieth Century Authors, Orwell categorically declared: “I was educated at Eton, 1917-1921, as I had been lucky enough to win a scholarship, but I did no work there and learned ve...