Christopher Warley's blog

In my house live a literary critic and a historian. They do not always get along. Aside from differing views on paint colors, dinner choices, and departure times, a regular dispute erupts concerning verb tenses: present tense or past tense? When you write about a book, do you describe its action in the present tense (Hamlet whines) or in the past tense (Hamlet whined)?

Last summer while travelling I read Moby Dick on my iPhone. I am now at a point in my life when, circumscribed by airline baggage weight restrictions, the choice between packing Moby Dick or an extra pair of shoes is no choice at all. So I downloaded a free version and tucked my phone in my pocket.

Can the upper class speak? There are signs that it cannot. Maybe this sounds silly, but if you are still in the market for a future for literary criticism, the accurate description of what the upper-class sounds and looks like might be a good place to start.

There have been two songs constantly on the radio at the beach in Italy this summer. The first, Bruno Mars’ “The Lazy Song” (“Today I don’t feel like doing anything”), is so annoying that it makes you want to do something, anything, as long as it is violent.

You know what kids need these days? Discipline. And heroes. And I am going to try to give them some of both.

Yes, Virginia, there can be a point to MLA.

Lately I often find myself saying “I cut Lady Mary Wroth from my syllabus because the poems are terrible.”

A student and a reader recently asked me: why is essentialism bad? Uhg, I thought, how do you answer that? But it is a fair and reasonable and nagging question, and I will give it a try.

In a talk at Stanford that I listened to here, Gayatri Spivak warned that literature departments were turning into opera.

Arcadians, I have a (maybe tedious) request for help with basic research: