At the Bookseller, Adam Blades, a "lecturer in Publishing," attempts to defend "celebrity tastemakers" (those with "book clubs") by making this claim about actual literary critics:
On the contrary, literary critics have rarely been objective. From Edgar Allen [sic] Poe to Elizabeth Hardwick, all promote their own approach to book criticism, injecting biases and agendas into their work.
On the face of it, these statements are conceptually incoherent. Of course literary critics are not objective, since criticism unavoidably involves interpretation and evaluation, and these are inherently subjective processes. Even that part of criticism requiring description is ultimately a subjective kind of description--this is the way the text works as I experienced it. And of course critics promote their own approach to the act of criticism since "approaches" to criticism are all we have. (Good critics are well aware of this, and do not pretend their own approach is "objectively" the most appropriate.) In literary criticism, "biases and agendas" are just other words for "critical judgment."
Blades invokes "objectivity" in order to muster the usual attack on expertise or authority in literary criticism--all judgment is subjective, so no one's perspective can be valued above that of anyone else. It's all "mere" opinion. But not all critical opinions are "mere." Some are reached through sustained reflection and achieved through genuine insight. They can be defended because they are anchored in a reading of the particulars of the work in question that is applied to a consistent overall explication intended to persuade other readers of its credibility. In other words, the critic's subjectivity is indistinguishable from the skill with which his/her "own approach" is exercised.
Such skill is grounded in an ability (perhaps a willingness) to pay careful attention to the "particulars"--the formal and stylistic strategies the work enlists to achieve its effects--and, ideally, a sufficient familiarity with the relevant literary history in which a work of prose or poetry is inevitably situated. The latter is usually the attribute of the professional literary critic that most induces populist resentment: isn't this sort of knowledge just an exercise in pedantry, an opportunity for the elitist critic to insinuate the superiority of his own impeccable taste? While a version of this criticism remains implicit in this writer's allusion to "biases and agendas," Blades instead suggests it is finally only the "flowery prose" to which such a critic resorts that separates the self-proclaimed literary critic from the celebrity book enthusiast.
While it may be true that too many reviewers substitute colorful phrasemaking for critical insight (although sometimes the phrasemaking succinctly embodies the insight, as in, say, the critical writing of William Gass), in my experience as a reader of reviews, the more frequent stylistic trespass is the constant invocation of the empty superlative (stunning! brilliantly original! glorious!), while the most common manifestation of an "agenda" usually involves not the promotion of a preferred critical method but the elevation of the reviewer through tedious reflections on the reviewer's own personal predilections and life circumstances.
Blades also cites a Harvard Business School study that, he says, found that professional reviewers are "less favourable to first-time authors, and rat[e] higher books that have already received media attention." It would appear that critics are harder on debuts than Amazon reviewers, while they are also more favorable to books that other critics have praised. The bandwagon effect is indeed a noticeable phenomenon in current literary culture, and it seems to suggest that whatever standards critics manage to sustain in reviewing debut authors strangely dissipate when considering the latest from established writers. If professional literary criticism does have a credibility problem, it is highlighted here, in this herd mentality and deference to the prerogatives of reputation--a cultivation of celebrity in its own way.
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