What is the importance of literary criticism?
 

American academics, undergraduates to full professors, are churning out vast quantities of literary criticism as theses, dissertations, articles, reports, peer-reviewed journal articles and books.

To what end?

Surely most of it is ignored, because it is worthless.

But what of the "worthwhile" literary criticism? I suppose at a certain level it tackles art and answers the question "what is this?" And also "what is important?"

Imagine going onto the internet in 40 years and coming across a thread about "The Road." You want to add your 2 cents. There are more than 1,000,000 replies in this thread. Luckily, someone has parsed this thread and boiled it down to the 200,000 most important replies. Now your job is to make your comment about this book, in the context of the 200,000 important previous replies in the thread. The better you are able to understand the history, the arguments, the schools, and then say something new, the more important your reply will be.

Good luck.

There is a lot out there to read. Literary critics anoint the stars. You have to be careful though, because more times than not critical opinion is driven by politics. Correct politics. This is a measure of McCarthy's greatness; his books are about men (mostly white westerners) and religion, are fraught with violence, go into great detail about horses, guns, knife fights, Mexican history, etc. Not the stuff most critics automatically dub masterworks. He labored most of his career in poverty and obscurity.

I really doubt that if a first time novelist produced Moby Dick today it would even get published.

Still, there were a small coterie of dedicated McCarthy acolytes in the universities that kept his name out there. I think they did us all a service.

I enjoy criticism by James Wood, Harold Bloom, and others. I think they can bring out certain attributes that I may not have fully appreciated. Their essays can be works of art in their own right. As Bloom shows, there is not a bright line between scruptural exegesis and literary criticism.

These folks that broadly assay the entire universe of literature are very few.

Rather, they whole up in their tiny little domain and wring out words.

"Literary Critic" is a job-description for precious few. Rather they are "Marxist Analysis of late 19th Century Welsh-centric Broadsides and Short Stories: domains of influence on the Dada movement".

LOL.

The ones who give out the prizes are the worst. I doubt McCarthy would have won the Pulitzer Prize were it not for Oprah. The National Book Award is a somewhat more against the grain and discovered him about fifteen years ago.

BTW, greatness not treatness

Critics have gone into reductive theories like literary psychoanalysis, semiotics, multiculturalism, and deconstruction; criticism has, in effect, deconstructed itself. It has disavowed all claim to knowledge and willfully proclaimed its own uselessness

--George Watson, professor of English literature at Cambridge

Great quote. You're priceless.

thanks for the quote. I particularly like how SU endorsed it, to the chagrin of Fawn Brodie's ghost.

Isn't it great? I love it. Brilliant.

Here is a terrific review of The Road from the New Republic.

http://www.powells.com/review/2007_05_17.html

Wood reprises the great post-apolcalypse novels and seems to proclaim this one his favorite. He's not been totally sold on McCarthy but in this review he seems to grudgingly acknowledge his brilliance.

The quote is about literary critics, not critics in the larger, Greek sense.