Tag Archives: formalism

Does Lit Crit Make Lit Less Fun?

By Robin Bates | Published: December 14, 2018

Friday My Ljubljana colleague Jason Blake alerted me to a Chronicle of Higher Education article that wrestles with the question of whether studying literature should be fun. It’s a fairly confused piece, with Baruch College’s Timothy Aubry conflating a number of issues better treated separately. Nevertheless, it’s worth a response because Aubry addresses questions that non-academics […]

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Invisible Man & Lolita Changed the ’50s

By Robin Bates | Published: December 13, 2016

Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and Nabokov’s “Lolita” both challenged basic 1950s assumptions. The former changed public perceptions on what it meant to be black while the latter violated a tacit agreement not to go digging under neatly manicured lawns bordered by white picket fences.

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Textualist Judges Out of Control

By Robin Bates | Published: July 24, 2014

Textualist judges committed the same mistake as formalists in ruling against federal subsidies for citizens who signed up for Obamacare in the federal exchanges.

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Arguing against Lit for Lit’s Sake

By Robin Bates | Published: January 28, 2014

Nabokov’s aestheticism in the 1960s tried to separate literature from history.

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