[BarbaraGordon]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

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?"

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