What makes great literature? Are the most "important" books those taught perennially in high schools and universities nationwide — those canonical texts constantly revisited and analyzed by scholars?

A talk with Dionne Brand about her recent book, Salvage, which looks at how the classic texts of Anglo-American fiction helped abet the crimes of capitalism, colonialism, and more. For decades, the ...

Not all of these writers might be considered “Western,” yet each of them are featured on this quarter’s syllabus for Stanford’s Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program. This reflects a growing ...

Last spring, after a year braving the seemingly endless cycle of readings and papers, I finally completed Yale’s Directed Studies curriculum. I approached DS with some trepidation. A rigorous ...

Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who championed and defended the Western canon in an outpouring of influential books that appeared not only on college syllabuses but also — unusual for an ...

Too often, we forget that fights about what we shouldn’t read are also battles over what we should read. And that every time someone attempts to ban Toni Morrison or Ta-Nehisi Coates, they’re also ...