Senses of Style: Poetry before Interpretation

Jeff Dolven's new book published in January 2018 by University of Chicago Press

Style is everywhere, but it evades criticism—especially now, when an age of interpretation asks us to look right through it. And yet style does so much tacit work, telling time, telling us apart, telling us who we are. What place does it have among our moment’s favored categories of form, history, meaning? What do we miss if we fail to look at it, to talk about it? Please join two of the most stylish literary critics as they deliberate these questions.

Jeff Dolven is a scholar and poet. He is Professor of English at Princeton University and the author of Scenes of Instruction and of the book of poems Speculative Music. He is also an editor-at-large at Cabinet Magazine. Michael Wood is a celebrated literary and cultural critic and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Princeton. He writes regularly for the NY Review of Books and the London Book Review. His many influential books include The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risk of Fiction; The Road to Delphi: the Life and Afterlife, and Literature and the Taste of Knowledge. More