April 11, 2008

The Death of Literary Studies

By EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN

Literary studies is "suffering from an epochal loss of confidence," declares William Deresiewicz in a recent article in The Nation. Noting that there is "no better way to take the … temperature" of the field than by glancing through the Modern Language Association's Job Information List, he does just that. Deresiewicz, an associate professor of English at Yale University, observes that the "lion's share" of available positions are in rhetoric and composition — "that is, not

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