Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that examines personality and its variation among individuals. It aims to show how people are individually different due to psychological forces. Its areas of focus include:
In psychology and sociology, socionics is a pseudoscientific theory of information processing and personality types. It incorporates Carl Jung's work on Psychological Types with Antoni Kępiński's theory of information metabolism.
The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a self-report questionnaire that makes pseudoscientific claims to categorize individuals into 16 distinct "psychological types" or "personality types".
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael often defied the consensus of her contemporaries.
Louis Menand is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America.
The Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS) is a self-assessed personality questionnaire. It was first introduced in the book Please Understand Me. The KTS is closely associated with the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI); however, there are significant practical and theoretical differences between the two personality questionnaires and their associated different descriptions.
Joan Barbara Acocella was an American dance critic and author. From 1998 to 2019, she was dance critic for The New Yorker. She also wrote for The New York Review of Books for 33 years and authored books on dance, literature, and psychology.
Isabel Briggs Myers was an American writer who co-created the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. The MBTI is one of the most-often used personality tests worldwide; over two million people complete the questionnaire each year. Isabel Briggs Myers typed herself as an INFP (Mediator).
Katharine Cook Briggs was an American writer who was the co-creator, with her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, of an inventory of a widely popular personality type system known as the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
Elizabeth Wagele (1939–2017) was an American artist, musician, and writer of books on the Enneagram of Personality and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
Diane Williams is an American author, primarily of short stories. She lives in New York City and is the founder and editor of the literary annual NOON. She is the author of eleven books, including How High? — That High, for which she was interviewed by Merve Emre in The New Yorker. Her book The Collected Stories of Diane Williams was published by Soho Press in 2018.
Virginia Heffernan is an American journalist and cultural critic. Since 2015, she has been a political columnist at the Los Angeles Times and a cultural columnist at Wired. From 2003 to 2011, she worked as a staff writer for The New York Times, first as a television critic, then as a magazine columnist, and then as an opinion writer. She has also worked as a senior editor for Harper's Magazine, as a founding editor of Talk, and as a TV critic for Slate. Her 2016 book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art argued that the Internet is a "massive and collective work of art", one that is a "work in progress", and that the suggested deterioration of attention spans in response to it is a myth.
Laurie Anne Helgoe is an American clinical psychologist, educator, and author interested in personality development and culture. In 2008, her research revealed a flaw in scholarly and popular accounts regarding people displaying traits of introversion and extraversion.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist. Ferrante's books, originally published in Italian, have been translated into many languages. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels are her most widely known works. Time magazine called Ferrante one of the 100 most influential people in 2016.
Susan Taubes was a Hungarian-American writer and intellectual. She committed suicide after the publication of her novel Divorcing.
Ravenna Mathews Helson was an American psychologist known for her research on the psychology of women and creativity. Dacher Keltner has described her as "a pioneer in the study of women's lives".
Alexandra Lange is an American architecture and design critic and author based in New York. The author of a series of critically acclaimed books, Lange is the architecture critic for Curbed. She has bylines published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Metropolis, Architect magazine, Architectural Digest; Architectural Record, The Architect's Newspaper, Cite; Domus; Domino; Dwell; GOOD; Icon, The Nation, New York magazine, Places Journal, Print and Slate. Lange is a Loeb Fellow, and her work has been recognized through a number of awards, including the 2019 Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary.
In literary criticism and cultural studies, postcritique is the attempt to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of critique, critical theory, and ideological criticism. Such methods have been characterized as a "hermeneutics of suspicion" by Paul Ricœur and as a "paranoid" or suspicious style of reading by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Proponents of postcritique argue that the interpretive practices associated with these ways of reading are now unlikely to yield useful or even interesting results. As Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker put it in the introduction to Critique and Postcritique, "the intellectual or political payoff of interrogating, demystifying, and defamiliarizing is no longer quite so self-evident." A postcritical reading of a literary text might instead emphasize emotion or affect, or describe various other phenomenological or aesthetic dimensions of the reader's experience. At other times, it might focus on issues of reception, explore philosophical insights gleaned via the process of reading, pose formalist questions of the text, or seek to resolve a "sense of confusion."
Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study is a widely-reviewed 2022 nonfiction book written by literary scholar John Guillory.
My Brilliant Friend is a 2011 novel by Italian author Elena Ferrante. It is the first of four volumes in Ferrante's critically acclaimed Neapolitan Novels series. The novel, translated into English by Ann Goldstein in 2012, explores themes of female friendship, social class, and personal identity against the backdrop of post-war Naples.
