Close reading is more than just paying attention to words on a page—it’s a deliberate, artful method of turning textual details into evidence for deeper interpretation. Literary critics use it to ...

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 ...

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” ( ...

Hollowed out. That’s how I frequently described West Virginia University during the nine years I worked there before leaving this summer. There was a library, but it bought fewer and fewer books. The ...

What is the purpose of education? For several decades, dating at least back to 1994 and former President Bill Clinton’s School-to-Work Opportunities Act, Democrats and Republicans agreed — the purpose ...