“There are hardly five critics in America, and several of them are asleep.” Students “seem less and less able to understand [literature's] cognitive value or to find that it has the exemplary force it once had”. These are “the worst of all times for literary criticism”.
These statements were made by major critics in 1952, 1972 and 1994, respectively. Survey contemporary criticism, and you'll frequently detect an elegiac strain, the mourning of “the death of the critic”, as the title of Rónán McDonald's polemic of 2009 had it. Given that literary critics have always seen their own species as endangered, however, another question comes to mind: not whether there really is a crisis in criticism, but why a certain kind of critic is so convinced there is.
When discussing contemporary literary criticism, the influence of the American mid-twentieth century can't be overstated. Critics like Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling strode like colossi through the landscape; little magazines packed a wallop; and, best of all, people actually read. Forget segregation; forget sexism. A vision of the mid-twentieth century as a literary-critical golden age is seemingly immortal.
We're often told that today's North American critics are missing something vital. But what? Ever self-reliant, American critics often identify the missing element as a certain intensity, as though the questing knight has grown flabby and a little domestic. In American Audacity: In defense of literary daring, an impressive new collection of essays, the Boston-based critic and novelist William Giraldi sounds the alarm. “The danger is real now”, he writes, “godlike and unprecedented, all- powerful and everywhere. The Internet has zapped us all into obliging zombies; it makes yesterday's threat from television look whimsical and rather cute.” Against these stupefying forces, Giraldi calls for the critic to return to fundamentals. “The critic's chief loyalty is to the duet of beauty and wisdom”, he writes, “to the well-made and usefully wise, and to the ligatures between style and meaning.” Giraldi is the sort of critic – often the most helpful when one is choosing what to read – who insists on the paramount importance of a work's aesthetic features. He is hostile to those who would perceive literature through a political or theoretical lens. “Ideology is the enemy of art because ideology is the end of imagination”, he avers.
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