The Case for Studying Literature

Stefan Collini

Teachers want to engage the interests of students, while, for larger political reasons, people want to encounter individuals who are in some major dimension ‘like’ themselves – whether as political representatives, or teachers, or, more ambiguously, as authors. Yet one of the most important functions of an education in a humanities subject is to introduce students to worlds that are different from the one they think they know, and chronological and cultural distance are among the most important forms of such difference. In some cases this argument may involve retaining traditional and now unfashionable texts; in others it may justify ‘rebalancing’ a selection by including historically neglected authors or genres. Either way, the search for ‘identification’ – with a character, a story or a writer – may be an incitement to youthful reading, but a too-easy endorsement of this quest soon impoverishes a syllabus.

Collection

Down among the Press Lords

Writing about the press by Andrew O’Hagan, Ross McKibbin, Jenny Diski, James Meek, Suzanne Moore, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Alan Rusbridger, Thomas Nagel and Raymond Williams.

At the V&A

Africa Fashion

Gazelle Mba

On​ 9 June 2020, two weeks after the murder of George Floyd, a photograph appeared on my Twitter feed of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. She was wearing a stole made of Ghanaian Kente cloth, its bold yellow and black geometric design set off by her red suit and heels. She was surrounded by a group of Democratic congressmen and women, including Chuck Schumer and...

 

Josephine Tey’s Claustrophobia

Tessa Hadley

It’s​ an uncanny thing, to revisit a book you liked in your youth. Even when the book is still as good as you thought it was, it isn’t the same book, because you’re not the same reader – you come at every sentence from a different angle, with new information and different tastes. The book doesn’t change, but you change and times change. I have a distinct memory...

 

The Refugee Underground

Daniel Trilling

The racist assumptions of some of the reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with some commentators remarking on the tragedy of war affecting people who look white and Western, have been widely noted. But media attention can be fickle. Several million Ukrainians were displaced in the previous stage of the war, between 2014 and 2022, yet this rarely made the headlines. It’s helpful to pay attention to where the silence falls, because it shows you the way power operates. Libya is a particularly revealing example.

Ho Ho Hmm…

Ho Ho Hmm…

Give a delightfully distracting LRB gift subscription from as little as £22.99

 

Fortress Conservation

Simone Haysom

In​ 2010, graphs that showed wild rhino numbers in South Africa plummeting towards zero began to circulate among conservationists. The animals were being poached at a rate far above replacement level, in a repeat of the crisis that had nearly wiped them out in the 1970s. Similar figures soon appeared for elephant populations in East Africa. In 2016, the Environmental Investigation Agency...

 

Nona Fernández

Chris Power

In 1959​, television screens across the United States became portals to other worlds. The Twilight Zone, an anthology series with no narrative links between episodes, showed characters going beyond the limits of normal human experience, encountering extraterrestrials, time travel, evil spirits and magical objects. The world we take for granted, the show suggested, might not be the one in...

 

Farewell to Modernism?

Hal Foster

T.J.Clark begins If These Apples Should Fall with a restaging of his first encounter with Cézanne, when as a 15-year-old in 1958 he was amazed by a reproduction of The Basket of Apples: ‘I think I can retrieve the feeling even sixty years later.’ This is one version of ‘the present’ in his subtitle, the summoning of a then of Cézanne painting and Clark...

LRB Diary for 2023

The LRB’s diary for 2023 includes a selection of extracts from the last forty years of Alan Bennett’s diary: a classic entry for every week, with illustrations by Jon McNaught and all the usual useful features.

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LRB x World Weather Network

For the next year, the LRB is collaborating with the World Weather Network, a constellation of weather stations set up by 28 arts organisations in oceans, deserts, mountains, farmland, rainforests, lighthouses and cities around the world, through which artists and writers will share observations, stories, reflections and images responding to their local weather and the effects of the climate emergency.

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