Wood has also written fiction—his debut novel, The Book Against God, came out earlier this year to mixed reviews, and he also published a collection of essays several years ago, entitled The Broken Estate. Yet he is known mostly for his criticism.

“I love doing what I do, because there is this space waiting to be filled…between literature and some of the rigor of scholarship,” he says.

The view that the line between literature and criticism shouldn’t exist is evident in Wood’s essays themselves. They are long pieces, four thousand words that critique concepts and ideas as much as the texts. In the course of a review he often alludes to other authors and works, since “all serious writers are very serious readers.”

Literary overlap is very important to Wood, who believes that literature cannot be studied without the commingling of styles and nationalities.

“You had Dostoyevsky reading Dickens, Conrad reading Dostoyevsky, Woolf reading Chekhov,” he says. “You can’t talk about the novel form unless you talk about the international form.”

According to Wood, one of the difficulties of analyzing literature in a university setting is the prospect of covering so many important authors and works in a single class.

“What tends to get overlooked…is world literature: Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Proust,” he says.

Ironically, Wood thinks that less reading should be done in American universities.

“I feel that you’re reading too much,” Wood says. “I’m generally in favor of reading a bit less and knowing it deeply.”