The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you’re “decoding

It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others – even my nearest and dearest – there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a...

My students should be afraid: choosing what kind of work you’ll do to a great extent means choosing who you’ll be.

What we readers do each time we open a book is to set up on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good...

Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.

Readers, professional or casual, are alert to passages in a book that illuminate what was previously shadowy and formless.

Those straight-spined parishioners could justify their exhibitionism by telling themselves that they were setting an example, even educating the rest of us.

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our life stories and – equally important – to find ourselves by understanding...

It’s a gift of tranquility when your adult desires mesh with your childhood background. I don’t quite know why mine didn’t, although I think books, again, are partly to blame.

I was assigned to the office of a recently deceased faculty member; the office hadn’t been cleaned out yet, and a few days before the fall term began, I unlocked the door to find a...

Edmondson has incisively discussed the ways college campuses have grown akin to upscale retirement homes for the very young, where the promise of intellectually demanding courses ranks far below the lure of new gymnastic facilities.

Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe’s essential, civilization-building chores.

Like overzealous religious converts, climbers originally from the lower rungs of society tend to go overboard when they ape the upper class.

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

I miss that world from the safe distance of memory.

My own mother, who’s always dazzled by my faculty and answering questions in the literature a category on Jeopardy whenever we watch it together, keeps urging me to try to get on the show to...

One of the many drawbacks of this “I teach what I am” approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor’s expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack.

Like a lot of other bashful introverts, I discovered that I like teaching a lot because it’s like acting. When I stepped into the classroom, I stepped into a role, one that allowed me to...

Luckily, my job demands constant reading, otherwise I’d have to figure out some other excuse.

Reading, my earliest refuge in the unknown world, made me want to venture into it.

Given the consumer-pleasing politics of today’s universities, I have, in effect, seventy new bosses each semester; they’re sitting at the desk in front of me.