The Art of Criticism

Greetings, all! I hope this finds you doing well and perhaps starting to dig out a bit from the wreckage of the semester's nutty final weeks. I expect to post again about some LIT 500 matters (a Trumpet retrospective and other final thoughts, perhaps), but since I recently chanced upon this interesting interview with Daniel Mendelsohn, I figured I'd send it along to you. In particular, near the end of the interview, you may find his thoughts on the role of literary theory in the undergraduate curriculum (e.g., "I think undergraduates should be kept away from Theory at all costs") to be especially interesting. Then, in answer to a subsequent question, he asserts that "it's better that [students] should be reading Pauline Kael reviews in the New Yorker than Derrida."