Claire Hua
14300120165
April 21, 2016
Transformation of Literary Criticism
Ronan McDonald, a lecturer in literature at the University of Reading, has written a book named “The Death of the Critic”, in which he described how the role of the literary critic has changed over the centuries, ultimately leading to "death" in the latter half of the 20th century. Nevertheless, to proclaim the death of the critic at this moment is still too early. What deserves more attention than this exaggerated title is the fact of decline of criticism.
Literary criticism has always been viewed as an ivory tower in the eyes of the common people, mainly due to its professionalization. Certainly there are peaks in artistic creativity and troughs. In a period of increasing literary creativity, as T.S. Eliot famously said, the old works are seen in a new light. We are now rather in a trough of literary creativity, probably not only because the rise of varieties of competing media, but that less exciting work was generated for literary critics to start a literary revolution. That also means the present literary criticism needs to complete an operation performed by the best “doctors” and go through a major transformation.
To be sure, literary criticism is not all negative. “Critic” is etymologically related to “criteria”, so the job of a literary critic is a judge, not a denouncer. The essence of literary criticism is therefore to evaluate. But there remain two problems when it comes to evaluation. Firstly, it is because literary criticism is evaluative, and because most of the evaluators are not creative writers themselves, that it is hated by creative writers. Just as John Ransom put it, “the critics have nearly always been amateurs, including the best ones” (Criticism, Inc.,1108). And from Brendan Behan: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it is done, they’ve seen it done