Iwas an English major in college, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand why I should pay to study literature when I knew how to read and could do so more happily on my own time. Like many others, ...

W hen I was an undergraduate at Amherst College, it was a rite of passage for all English majors to discover that they had entirely misunderstood Robert Frost’s most famous poem “The Road Not Taken” ( ...

One of the primary missions of any educational institution is to produce graduates who are literate. The ability to derive meaning from print is central to the definition of literacy. Many people ...

The invention of close reading. By transforming quotations into evidence, close reading served as way to turn postwar criticism into a specialized knowledge. But what if we treated it more as an art ...