Dan Green on Academic Criticism
However, I also think it’s a little unfair to say that the “average intelligent reader” is interested merely in a “recommendation.” This only reinforces the divide between “criticism,” which is perforce practiced primarily in the academy, and reviewing, the goal of which is presumably to provide a recommendation. [...] As I have suggested several times on this blog, what both contemporary literature and literary criticism need is not for academic critics to become more “accessible” but for literary magazines and journals to publish more non-academic criticism that goes beyond book chat and conventional journalistic reviews but that also avoids the navel-gazing “refinements” of academic criticism.
[...] in my opinion most habitual readers of literary works want most immediately to have a fulfilling reading experience and, to the extent that criticism is pertinent to this goal, to use literary criticism as a way of enlarging and enhancing this experience. Thus, if “many non-academic readers would in fact like to think in more careful ways about their reading,” as Rohan acknowledges, and if that’s “where academic expertise presented in an accessible manner comes in,” then the kind of “expertise” such readers might find helpful would be an ability to describe the aesthetic strategies and effects at work in a text, based ultimately on the ability to pay careful and focused attention to the text, in effect to let it reveal its own aesthetic nature. A knowledge of literary history and of the ways in which all poetry and fiction is finally implicated in that history could also be valuable, as long as that knowledge is put in the service of illuminating the work at hand, not of demonstrating the critic’s own superior powers of discernment.
Dan Green. “What They Are After.” The Reading Experience (8 Jan 2008).
(I quote Dan at length because what he writes echoes my feelings on the criticism of comics as something beyond mere “recommendation” (reviews) that aims to enhance the reading experience through attention to not only the work but it’s relation to history. This is something I aim for (probably not achieving as often as I’d like).)
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