In an interview with J.C. Hallman, Walter Kirn discusses the current state of literary criticism:
JCH: Are books and literature in a state of crisis these days? If so, does that have anything to do with how we write about literature?
WK: I certainly hope they’re in a state of crisis. The moment they’re not, they’ll probably cease to matter much. Maintaining a state of crisis around matters that many people might considered settled – What is it to be a person? What is it to tell a story? – is the first job of literary art. Nothing keeps the novel livelier and more relevant than those ceaseless “Is the novel dead?” essays, for example. The markets live by the competition of fear and greed, they say, and literature lives by the struggle between hope and despair over certain fundamental concerns such as whether life can be fruitfully represented at all. Crisis and criticism go hand in hand. …
JCH: As you see it, what happened to criticism? That is, how did we move from [Matthew] Arnold and [Walter] Pater and [Oscar] Wilde to the kind of academic criticism produced in English departments?
WK: What happened to criticism is that it became a profession, even a guild, heavy on trade craft and jargon and dedicated to exclusion and self-protection. It became a way of credentialing an insider class and assuring its members of an income inside of the academy. As such, criticism took up a specialized vocabulary whose chief function, as I see it, was to signal loyalty to the executive board of the approved critical class. There are all these words in contemporary criticism – “gendered,” “hegemonic,” “interrogate,” etc. – that strike me as verbal secret handshakes. They might have been meaningful once, but more and more they feel like coded transmissions between the troops and their leaders. And they make for very ugly sentences. Critical prose of the type that includes them is singularly ugly prose, and I’m with Einstein and similar physicists in believing that elegance bears a close relation to truth. …
Writerly criticism uses a personal vocabulary, not a received or assumed one. It sounds, when read, like an actual human being thinking and feeling. It resists theoretical paraphrase. It provokes conversation rather than shutting it down through intimidating, scholastic moves. It gives pleasure. It releases more energy than it traps. And it takes responsibility for its points and statements rather than shifting responsibility to some larger body of expert thought.
The Dish 