Read deeply. Understand clearly.
The blog November 2026
Study notes, close readings and exam-focused essays on English literature, literary theory and poetry.
Latest English Literature 11 min read
The Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural and literary movement that flourished roughly between 1918 and 1937, centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. It...
Read the storyThe Yale Critics, also called the Yale School, were a group of literary scholars based at Yale University who rose to prominence between the late 1960s and the...
Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher and founder of deconstruction, critiques logocentrism as the deep-rooted tendency in Western philosophy to privilege speech over writing and to treat spoken language...
Jacques Derrida’s “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” is a 1966 essay that marked the arrival of post-structuralism as a serious challenge to...
Psycholinguistics is the study of how the mind acquires, represents, understands, and produces language. It connects the structures of language with the cognitive processes that make communication possible....
The language of paradox is the primary medium of poetry, according to Cleanth Brooks, because it allows writers to express complex emotional truths that logic and science cannot reach. In...
Connotation and Denotation: Connotation refers to the emotional associations and cultural weight a word carries beyond its dictionary definition. Denotation is that dictionary definition — the literal, factual...
Last updated: April 28, 2026 The Chicago School Neo-Aristotelians were a group of literary critics based at the University of Chicago from the 1930s onward who revived Aristotle’s...
J. Hillis Miller’s essay “The Critic as Host” (1977) is one of the most brilliant and famous defenses of deconstructive criticism ever written. It was composed as a...
Learn I. A. Richards' two uses of language, scientific and emotive, with clear exam notes, examples, and New Criticism links.