Peter Brooks is an emeritus professor of comparative literature at Yale University.
Stories by This Author
The Review | Essay
Prohibitions on knowledge draw attention to what they prohibit.
The Review
Plans to temporarily suspend graduate admissions may backfire.
The Review
Once, their voices spoke louder than money. We can no longer count on that.
The Review
In revamping legal education, don’t sacrifice narrative, rhetoric, and the humanities.
The Chronicle Review
They have the dubious honor of being subject to both contempt and unrealistic expectations.
The Review
In its foreign adaptations, what will become of American academe’s utopian spirit?
The Review
The penalties for unethical reading Lawyers, like literary scholars, interpret texts. Strange, when you think about it, that there should be a need for interpretation — that writings and statements should not be transparent. Etymologically, an interpreter is a kind of go-between, like an…
The Review
Are humanists to blame for the kind of analysis found in the infamous torture memo? I’ve long been invested in the notion that teaching to read literature carefully, seriously, reflectively can be an ethical act. So I was shaken when I recently began the latest book of an author I admire very much,…
The Review
“Numberless are the world’s narratives.” So began Roland Barthes’s “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” published in 1966 -- an essay that inaugurated the new discipline of narratology. “There isn’t, there has never been anywhere any people without narrative,” wrote Barthes.…
News
The crisis of graduate education and the academic job market is by now so much a subject of public debate that there is no need to restate its grim parameters. I cannot bring any new insight to the analysis of employment figures and Ph.D.-production rates. As a teacher of the humanities who is…