Splinters

Yes, everyone who's anyone is linking to David Herman's article on "the death" of Literary Criticism in Prospect magazine. It's the kind of article that this kind of magazine specialises in: an analysis from a deceptively-concerned consumer. It's a variant of the "death of the novel" story that appears occasionally. Why, he asks, isn't Lit Crit competing with science and history in the book charts?

Well, one needn't look further than the article itself for an answer. Read the attention-grabber under the title: "In the 1960s, literary theory boasted the death of the author. But it was the critic who really died. Who killed him?"

It boasted?

That was Barthes and Foucault (via Blanchot?s deeper questioning) and not everyone agreed. "Not everyone-agreeing" is part of literary criticism as it is part of Science and History; they're on-going investigations. Only consumers don't really want that sense of on-goingness. They want certainty; they want a Grand Theory. Hence the triumphalism in that word boasted; it's what journalists in bars remember. It's also why big theories like evolution, and great stories such as Hitler's life, get more attention and sell more books than literary criticism. And the further we get from literature, the further we get from literary criticism. Hence also the rise in popularity of the prurient, revelatory biography of artists; a manifestation of denial; a fear of what a work of literature is: separate from our ordinary lives, and what that separateness means.

In Herman's words, literary criticism has "shrunk-to ? highbrow feminism, queer theory, deconstruction." It's difficult to argue with that of course. But why has it shrunk? People in universities are harassed into labelled boxes to attract students and thereby please the bean-counters who employ them. The critics Herman mentions had the lebensraum to explore ideas. This is gone. Those who survive are the sharks with jargon for teeth. And who is to blame for that? The same Thatcherites allowed room to express their philistinism in conservative magazines like Prospect.

I don't miss the good ol' days that Herman refers to, because I wasn't around then. I've had to find my own way once I vomited up the jargon. You can find two articles on Spike by me about literary critics worth reading if you are, in fact, interested in literary criticism and not just posing. Neither offers isms to talk loudly about in bars ? both investigate written works with infinite patience, focussing on the mystery that is literature in itself; not as an item in a cultural inventory. They have given me more than scientists, historians and television producers put together. Neither writer is to be found searching Prospect's archives.