This, I think, speaks to why people often buy into this separation: because art is artful, and criticism is critical. Yes, a critic’s work is necessarily reactionary-inasmuch as there usually is some work that prompts the writing-but isn’t this true of all writers? Can’t most novels and poems and plays be considered, at least in some way, reactions to other work? Even if the connection is precarious and illusory, it still seems apt to say that art carries with it its own criticisms, even if those criticisms don’t explicitly name the texts to which they are responding. They are not enemies, no matter how painful or seemingly malicious their words can be. In fact they are so similar that the gap between critic and non-writer is much more substantial than that between critic and artist.īy shoving critics out of literature we’re deliberately excluding an entire group of people who are on the side of books. They are-if my point’s not hitting home-just like the people they write about. Critics have struggled to develop their voices and dealt with the same humbling critiques of their work that they offer to others. They chose writing because, like any novelist or poet, it is all they want to do, and anything else would be a compromise, a defeat. They believe in the importance of books and the beauty of literary creation. They love reading with the same fervor and nuttiness as anyone. They’ve gone to the same schools and grew up in the same cities. The eloquent and artful construction of sentences takes so much effort to learn and to learn well that any dismissal of critics as (somehow) purely functionary referees or as descriptive commentators or as gatekeepers to the public’s purchases seems not only wrong but completely irrelevant to what’s actually going on.Ĭritics have read the same books you have. To develop the communicative skills necessary to produce even the most mundane and banal review still requires many years of reading and writing-and not just in regular doses either, but more like reading hundreds of books and writing thousands of pages. When viewed as a separate entity, criticism becomes this Big Brother-like authority ready to pop up and take down any unsuspecting artist it turns criticism into a practical evil that published authors must suffer through and it devalues the work of those who became critics because they love literature and they love to write.īecause isn’t this the obvious thing being ignored all the time? That critics are, indeed, writers, too? That they wouldn’t be publishing and working if they couldn’t write? And, even more than that, write very well? It takes a lot of dedication and discipline to become a good writer, no matter what type of writing you engage in. ![]() The word “also” there insists on criticism’s inclusion as a genre of literature, and not as a subject that stands outside of it. Now, by that I do not mean that criticism is both outside and inside of literature. What’s intimated in many defenses of criticism is this gap between observer and observed, between artist and non-artist. But while I appreciate the efforts of my fellow critics, there is one aspect to nearly all of these defenses that I disagree with, deeply, and that is the implication that criticism is separate from the literature it describes, as if novelists, poets, playwrights, and nonfiction writers were the players in the game and we critics merely the referees. Moreover, many of these writers have brought brilliant insights into what can often be a dismissed vocation. Now as a critic I love these essays I get a kick out of seeing how others define what it is that I do. Or-in the cases of, say, Samuel Johnson or Edmund Wilson or Northrop Frye-myriad defenses for the utility of literary criticism pervade so much of their work that in some sense their whole catalogues function as insistent rationalizations for their own continued existence. ![]() In other cases, these declarations appear as manifestos, screeds, or present themselves as re-evaluations in changing times. ![]() These often take the form of prefaces or introductions to collections of essays and criticism-the feeling is one of almost embarrassed justification, as if without a wholly developed philosophy on the vitality of criticism a book filled with such work would be considered superfluous or even in bad taste. Every once in a while, a critic will feel it necessary to define what they think of as their role in the larger literary community.
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