Earlier this month, English professor Timothy Aubry published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review with the rather querulous title “Should Studying Literature Be Fun?” The essay was a kind of précis (as far as I can tell) of his new book Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures. I have not been able to read the book yet—though I hope to!—but I found Aubry’s essay quite engaging and much deeper than its title would indicate. “Fun” is not really the right word for the problem Aubry sets himself as an observer of his field of literary studies. It’s not the wrong Read more