English literature

Your Chatbot Is Not Tolstoy

I thought that we had hit rock bottom with English pedagogy when the National Council of Teachers of English proclaimed in 2022 that “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Nope. There’s a new plague on the rise in English classrooms, and it […]

Read More

Literature Has Become a Playground for Marxists

Last week, a student of mine learned that I did not identify as far left. I watched, on the Zoom call, as her pupils dilated in fascination: “But you were an English major at Columbia!,” she exclaimed. Incidents like these are not uncommon. Over on my Instagram page, where I post videos to promote the […]

Read More

Why We Should Free Literary Study from Marxist Proponents

I scanned the first message I received in my Columbia University MA English group chat. Bookmarking my copy of Ayn Rand’s We the Living, a novel about the ills of post-Revolutionary Russia, I recoiled. Reviewing the text, sent by a researcher of “imperial conspiracy” in a “postcolonial context,” I felt my vision blurring. This couldn’t […]

Read More

You Don’t Have To Be A Professor

Given that it’s been 30 years since I left graduate studies in English Lit, I don’t spend much time reading up on the field. Still, when I saw the provocative headline, “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind,’” on a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education I knew immediately that this […]

Read More