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” ( ...

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 ...

Many children who do not have trouble learning how to read do have trouble understanding what they read. Yet surprisingly, comprehension instruction did not receive much attention from reading ...

Iwas an English major in college, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand why I should pay to study literature when I knew how to read and could do so more happily on my own time. Like many others, ...

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 ...