Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers

Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers
Name	Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers
Founded	1994
Headquarters	United States
Leader title	President

Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers is a professional organization founded in 1994 that brings together scholars, critics, and writers from across the United States and internationally to address issues in literary studies and literary culture. It engages with debates involving figures and institutions across the humanities, and it interacts with universities, journals, and cultural organizations in North America and Europe. The association has been involved in public controversies and institutional reforms while publishing journals and sponsoring conferences that attract scholars, critics, and authors.

History

The association was established amid debates involving scholars such as Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, Donald Davie, E. D. Hirsch Jr., and Roger Kimball and in the context of institutional shifts connected to Stanford University, Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, and Columbia University. Its early years intersected with controversies sparked by proponents and critics of theories associated with New Criticism, Deconstruction, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, New Historicism, and figures like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Terry Eagleton, and Edward Said. Founding discussions referenced public debates involving journals and publishers such as The New Criterion, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, and institutions like the Modern Language Association, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and Royal Society of Literature. The association’s formation also responded to curricular and publishing controversies involving books and authors such as Samuel Johnson, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Mission and Activities

The association states aims that connect literary scholarship, critical practice, and creative writing, engaging figures and venues like Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Princeton University Press, and Harvard University Press while dialoguing with organizations such as American Academy of Arts and Sciences, British Academy, Institute for Advanced Study, National Humanities Center, and Smithsonian Institution. Its activities involve advocacy concerning hiring and tenure at University of Chicago, University of California, Berkeley, Brown University, Duke University, and Johns Hopkins University, and public-facing projects involving media outlets like The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe. The association promotes engagement with literary canons that include authors like Homer, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Robert Frost.

Membership and Governance

Membership draws academics, critics, and writers affiliated with institutions such as Princeton University, Yale University, Harvard University, Columbia University, Oxford University, Cambridge University, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and Duke University, as well as independent scholars linked to presses like Vintage Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Knopf, Penguin Books, and Bloomsbury Publishing. Governance has featured scholars and public intellectuals who have taught or published at Brown University, Cornell University, Rice University, University of Virginia, Northwestern University, and University of Michigan and who have served on boards connected to Modern Language Association and Association of American Universities. Leadership structures mirror nonprofit organizations registered in jurisdictions such as New York (state), Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C..

Publications and Awards

The association publishes journals and newsletters that enter conversations alongside periodicals like PMLA, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, The Sewanee Review, and Raritan, and it has issued special volumes engaging scholarship on authors such as Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Alice Munro, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo. It confers prizes and fellowships comparable in prestige to awards associated with National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker Prize, Nobel Prize in Literature, and Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and sponsors essay and book awards honoring scholarship on canonical writers including John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

Conferences and Events

The association organizes annual conferences and panels often held in cities and venues such as New York City, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Cambridge, Oxford, The British Library, The Library of Congress, and The Morgan Library & Museum. Programs feature roundtables and keynotes involving critics and authors like Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, Anthony Grafton, Marjorie Garber, Gerald Graff, Judith Butler, Marianne Hirsch, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cornel West, Alain Finkielkraut, and Simon Schama, and panels that address pedagogy and canon debates connected to Common Core State Standards Initiative, No Child Left Behind Act, and curricular reforms at institutions including City University of New York and California State University.

Criticism and Controversies

The association has attracted criticism and controversy connected to disputes over literary theory and canon formation involving scholars such as Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Marjorie Perloff, and Frederick Crews; institutional critiques referencing Modern Language Association; and public debates in outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Times Literary Supplement, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Critics have charged it with positional stances in culture wars that implicate commentators and institutions including Roger Scruton, Christopher Hitchens, Frank Kermode, Camille Paglia, D. W. Winnicott, and Lionel Trilling, and legal or policy disputes touching donors, trustees, and administrative decisions at universities such as Princeton University, Yale University, and Harvard University.

Category:Literary societies