What Makes for a Good Literary Critic

In this essay I propose that literary critics should not adhere solely to one approach.

There is no single correct method of literary criticism, no single critical approach to literary works that will uncover all the significant truths about them.  Works of literature have been written for a very long period of human history--at different times, in different places, about different issues, and in different moods.  Though the philosophical inquiry into the nature of literature can isolate the differentiable qualities of the art, such generalizations are not as important to literary critics.  Furthermore, the scrutiny of literary theories, although it contributes to greater comprehension of texts, does not lead necessarily to greater appreciation of literature.  For example, it is absurd to suggest that no Greek had appreciated Sophocles before Aristotle wrote the Poetics.  Appreciation can be independent of a critical theory, although the development and application of a critical theory can help to clarify, focus and increase appreciation.

Art is greater than its interpreters, for all criticism is incomplete, limited, oblique.  I am not suggesting that there are no standards of value, that we must resort to personal taste.  I am suggesting, however, that no single critical approach can determine what a text is and whether or not the text is good.  It may be possible to establish some generalizations, and those generalizations may reveal the nature and quality of a work, increasing the comprehension and appreciation of the text, but those generalizations by definition are reductive and indefinite.  A single critical approach can never be an adequate and complete description of a work of art.

It is easy to understand the reasons that is such.  A poem, for example, is a complex of meaning that often has an immediate and simple impact on a reader, and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to describe that complex and simultaneously to account for its impact.  Furthermore, a poem often has variable impacts on readers.  Finally, an analytic discussion, although useful, may not increase an appreciation of a poem.  Something always is excluded in the discussion.  Literary criticism is an art, not a science, and critics who reduce their approaches to the scientific method stifle literature's vitality.  The supposed truth that any critic can know and communicate is part of a larger truth she can only suggest.

Moreover, literary criticism is not an end in itself, but a means to greater comprehension and appreciation of literary works.  A critic always must test her success in her achievements of those ends.  The tendency of influential critics is to establish or adopt an approach and to engage that method for the purposes of comprehension and appreciation.  Thus, the study of literary criticism is the study of techniques of illumination.  If it becomes the study of special vocabulary or procedures, then it is a waste of time.  A student must experience a work of art, and criticism must assist the student in that experience.

Criticism is the formal discourse of students--students of life.  Criticism acknowledges its interdependence with the creative arts, and those arts are criticisms of life.  Artists arrange and arrest their subjects in forms that are separate from but part of life that confronts them.  Literature is life with form and meaning, life framed and identified.  Thus, literary criticism is the study of form and content with an underlying effort to establish appreciation.

The wrong approaches to literature are numerous and testify to occasional needs, special interests, or intellectual pride--all of which only serve their respective followers.  To avoid the discontinuity of knowledge, some critics advance a particular approach and make it predominant.  When followers blindly accept the method, they think it is the only one possible, and when the method proves to be weak or unsound, those followers often continue to adhere to it simply for the sake of knowledge.

Awareness of the diversity of literary texts and critical approaches is essential.  Briefly, a good critic is a good listener.  To comprehend and appreciate literature, a critic must be responsive to the inherent characteristics of each text and approach.  Critics who concern themselves with a single issue, predetermining the meaning of a text, do not listen to what the text actually says.  A feminist critic, for example, often imposes her own meaning on a text, rather than discovering a different meaning.  A single critical approach must not become a routine because there are valuable points of view that are outside the particular approach.  In other words, a more complete comprehension and appreciation of a text comes only to those critics who blend the insights yielded by several or, better, many critical approaches.