the Greater Nomadic Council

For what it's worth, I don't think bloggers (or anyone else worth listening to, for that matter) attack criticism. What they attack is a certain kind of criticism in which the actual literary work gets smothered beneath a theory-based pile-on. I've been in graduate seminars where we spent most of our time reading piles of dubious interpretations of works while barely looking at the actual works themselves. Attempting to marshal evidence from the text to show why (for example) a Lacanian interpretation made little sense was often met with skepticism and intimiations that one was either hopelessly old-fashioned or obviously didn't understand the lingo of the great theorists.

Last week, I gave my students an article that interprets a medieval French romance according to feminist semiology. In her abstract, the author claims that the signs in the romance "serve to question the poem's interpretation of its characters' identity as much as they confirm it." Do what now? I've been in classrooms where people would have nodded sagely at the articulation of such a trite, conventional paradox without even bothering to question whether that phrase even means anything--or whether such a non-conclusion illuminates the actual literary work in any significant way.

Studying literature is a fairly modest vocation. I think many profs have made it unnecessarily arcane, to the detriment of their credibility (both in and outside the classroom) and the perception of literature among the general public as well.

That's all very true. There's a fair amount of bad criticism out there, but I don't think it has much to do with whether or not the critic is employing a particular theoretical framework or not. Pretty much all the modern theoretical schools have at least a handful of insights that are worthwhile to consider in regard to most literary works. It's simply up to the critic to apply them appropriately and to actually think rather than take a cookie-cutter approach that attempts to shoe-horn (hooray for mixed metaphors) a particular text into the given framework. I guess what I was alluding to was the attempt, which I run across regularly, to conflate bad criticism with all criticism.

Your specific example of nonsense is an interesting one—with a slight bit of rewording, it could actually make sense. Even so, I think it points out the fact that too many literature students and critics have middling to poor critical and logical thinking skills. I consider myself to be strong in that area, but only because I have a fair amount of math, science, and computer training (particularly the latter) along with a heavy, heavy dose of chess (I play every day). If I had spent my entire life just reading poetry, I doubt I would have learned those thinking skills. Perhaps along with intro to theory literature students should be required to take an intro to logical thinking course?

I wouldn't want to go that far, Mallarme :). There has to be some refuge for avant-gardists fleeing from "logocentrism". Contempt for ordinary, instrumental logic has been a mainstay of eclectic aestheticism for centuries, not to mention much of the religious tradition to which theory remains genealogically linked.

Even Lacanian criticism has its own "logic". In any case, it's impossible to understand him without strong analytical skills. Of course, there is the objection that for some, encountering Lacan or a similar thinker is experienced as a "shamanistic" encounter. But that's only one way the text can be read--it can also be read seriously.

All that said, I remain nostalgic for the more political, down-to-earth, and interdisciplinary critical tradition represented by people like Trilling. Of course, the kind of specialist, non-utilitarian criticism that Trilling (who lived in a time when American academic culture was still findings its bearings) supported has evolved into the current jargon-friendly environment. But IMO specialization and jargon are not actually the problem. The problem is the lack of forums for "public intellectuals"--for mediations between elite criticism and the criticism of everyday life. The result, it would seem, is a widening divide between 'elite criticism' and 'common sense', to the detriment of both.

You have to master the rules before you can break them. Futhermore, there's a difference between art and criticism. While artists are free to be as illogical as they like, critics are supposedly doing something that requires logical thinking. Only the greatest of critics can move successfully into an artistic mode in their work. Sorry, but I still think some basic training in logical and critical thought should be required.