The New Cultural Criticism

A writer is forever at risk of hubris. A writer plays god, after all; he or she is a shaper of reality, a giddy or miserable tyrant, the sole purveyor of whatever currents pass through the brain and onto the page. And the writer-critic is no better—conventional fiction is audacious enough, but to render judgment upon judgement? To decree what is high, what is low, or to attempt to render reality with that critic’s scalpel, that ranging mind’s eye? Oh, no. What an invitation for trouble.