I Don't Get Literary Criticism ...

[Babbler]

It seems pointless to me, in that it doesn't seem to do anything useful or even intellectually interesting. It seems to me that, with the right theory and right selection and reading of the "texts" (as the cool kids cal it), you can reading into anything whatever you want to prove anything. It doesn't seem to advance or add anything to the general body of knowledge like most academic disciplines.

Is this true or I am just ignorant and need to see the light? PLEASE ENLIGHTEN ME!!!

 

[Fifty]

I think the best way to look at literary criticism is as a subgenre of literature. So criticism is itself literature. Now, much criticism today has tried to repackage traditional lit crit as either a) really really bad attempts at philosophy, or b) really really bad attempts at social science. Both those forms of lit crit are indeed pointless, IMO.

Get a copy of "Understanding Poetry" by Brooks and Warren for an example of good literary criticism.

 

[cardgame]

 

[Lord Baal]

Damn you cardgame! I was going to post that.

 

[JollyRoger]

I look at Literary Criticism as one side of the "conversation" in the literary sphere (with the works themselves being the other side). Pretty much like the "conversation" going on in law between the court opinions (and to a lesser degree acts of the legislative & executive branches) and law review articles.

Criticism can be helpful in getting you to see things in the literature that you wouldn't otherwise see, but it may also point to things that just aren't there. I generally get a collection of essays put together by Harold Bloom to supplement my reading, but I certainly do not agree with all the criticsm I read. Bloom in particular sees thing a lot differently than I do and we have a significant difference of opinion on the long-term canonical potential of works on the fringe. Since he does this for a living, he is likely more right than wrong when we disagree, but that still doesn't spare his essays from the string of expletives that I am apt to launch at them between swigs of grog.

 

[Agent327]

It seems pointless to me, in that it doesn't seem to do anything useful or even intellectually interesting. It seems to me that, with the right theory and right selection and reading of the "texts" (as the cool kids cal it), you can reading into anything whatever you want to prove anything. It doesn't seem to advance or add anything to the general body of knowledge like most academic disciplines.

Is this true or I am just ignorant and need to see the light? PLEASE ENLIGHTEN ME!!!

I suggest reading a couple of issues of the NYT Review of Books first.

 

[Bast]

It seems pointless to me, in that it doesn't seem to do anything useful or even intellectually interesting. It seems to me that, with the right theory and right selection and reading of the "texts" (as the cool kids cal it), you can reading into anything whatever you want to prove anything. It doesn't seem to advance or add anything to the general body of knowledge like most academic disciplines.

Is this true or I am just ignorant and need to see the light? PLEASE ENLIGHTEN ME!!!

Well that would also be true for film criticism. I don't really care.

But I prefer to be writing literature or making films than to be critiquing either.