What is literary taste, and how does one develop it? If the question of like / don’t like is insufficient, what other considerations come into play? My guru in this matter is little-read English novelist Arnold Bennett, whose L...
According to Roland Barthes, the laziest form of literary criticism is that which focuses purely on enjoyment. In a famous passage from Roland Barthes (translated here by Richard Howard) he questions the validity of an aestheti...
For those of us whose university days are in the past, for whom books are now non-obligatory, what is the point of reading? Is it now just an escapist leisure activity, or should it be a tool for continuing one’s learning? So: ...