I have sometimes considered writing "personal" criticism--the sort of criticism that embeds discussion of a book or writer in subjective circumstances (the year of reading Whitman!) or connects the work to one's own "life experiences." However, I have always hesitated after reflecting on how little I usually admire such criticism when I do occasionally venture to read it: I really don't care what you were doing the morning you read "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," and if I wanted to learn about your college years I would seek out your own memoir and not the book you are otherwise supposed to be reviewing.
(Plus, whenever I have begun a review or critical essay with autobiographical reflections, I quickly rediscover how utterly tedious most of my life has been and that I thus have little to say about it. I can sometimes muster interesting things to say about a book I've read, but not about my life.)
Arguably the turn to personal or autobiographical criticism became more evident first in academic criticism, as part of the generalized revolt over the past 50 years or so against the academic practices of the previous 50 years (among them "objectivity" and "analysis"), almost all of them ultimately consigned to the dustbin of academic and literary history. (As eventually will be, of course, the practices that came to replace to them--although whether the notion of dispassionate analysis will ever make a comeback is probably more dubious.) The increasing frequency of personal reflection in more general-interest criticism is no doubt less purposeful, the result of some combination of the rise of "creative nonfiction," the domination of reviewing by novelists and poets themselves rather than professional critics, and, of course, the internet.
It is tempting to say that the latter is the chief culprit, as it is in so many of the other appraisals of the social and cultural upheavals we are currently experiencing, but it seems to me that its primary contribution to this trend has been to provide a great increase in the number of publication sites (including journals meant to replicate print literary magazines and book reviews but also blogs and online reading diaries) for both creative and critical writing, which in turn created the conditions making it possible for more personal essays to be published and creating a need for reputable reviewers. But of course the rise of creative nonfiction, both as a category of publishing and an area of concentration in the creative writing curriculum, was a phenomenon largely independent of the development of the internet and seems explicable mostly as a phenomenon within literary culture, personal expression becoming the predominant aesthetic value. Moreover, the prevalence of creative writers themselves as authors of book reviews surely predates the absorption of book discussion by the internet, and the notion that criticism by practitioners is somehow more authoritative than criticism by those more fully oriented toward, well, criticism, is a failure of judgment by book review editors more than it is a surfeit of qualified critics.
I would not contend that critical objectivity is always fully possible, nor that literary criticism has no use for subjective impressions. It is possible, however, to describe a literary work under review or analysis with conscientious accuracy, and providing such description has always seemed to me to be one of the pressing--if not the most pressing--obligations of the critic. If evaluation is part of the task in a particular critical piece (a review, presumably), such a judgment cannot credibly be made unless the critic has shown a keen enough comprehension of the relevant features of the text at hand. This sort of attention to the tangible features of the text is what is most often missing from personal/autobiographical criticism, since evaluation still remains, just made more nebulous and subjective than usual. Conventional reviews too often settle for plot summary in place of deeper formal and stylistic explication; personal essays impersonating reviews frequently substitute strings of figurative language expressing the reviewer's readerly sensibility for even cursory plot summary.
If readers want some sense of the personality of the reviewer--and I'm not entirely convinced they do: most readers of reviews seem to want a more thought-out kind of reading recommendation--there are ways to convey this without resorting to literal autobiography and personal confession. The reviewer should provide some sense of the standards being used to reach a critical judgment, and this can be done while acknowledging their subjective selectivity--in effect disclosing the reviewer's own aesthetic sensibility as manifested in the assumptions those standards imply. Neither the criteria used nor the application of them to the particulars of the work need to be articulated in a literal, unduly mechanical way--here are the criteria, now watch me apply them--but can be suggested more subtly and indirectly, and executed with a verbal flair and judicious insight that surely draws attention to the critic's individual quality of mind.
But perhaps the more frequent kind of recourse to the personal or autobiographical in works of ostensible literary criticism is to be found in articles and essays less standardized than reviews, more discursive or exploratory, reflective or ruminative pieces in the form of an "appreciation," reconsideration, or extended critique. Here the temptation to underscore one's response to a writer's work by literally invoking personal reactions and experiences seems greatest, and I do not avow that such a move is wholly illegitimate. If you believe literature can make a difference in people's lives, the evidence from one's own life seems an obvious place to turn. But at some point such exercises become simply personal essays rather than literary criticism, and again my own history of both writing and reading critical essays tells me it is entirely possible to convey personality and perspective without crossing this line. Close reading or analysis does not require a turgid prose style, nor does it necessarily entail endless quotations and an eye-glazing analytic detachment. The goal should be to be communicate the critic's most concentrated experience of the work, and this ought to motivate his/her most discerning and dynamic writing, not the most pedantic.
Nonfiction that includes reflections on other writers and writing but is otherwise simply an autobiographical narrative is certainly not encompassed here in my skepticism about autobiographical criticism. I am focusing on literary criticism that incorporates the personal and autobiographical as a strategy for carrying out acts of criticism, often self-reflexively acknowledging the strategy within the piece itself as if to underscore the critical intent. Sometimes the author is simply venturing an experiment with this device, but at other times it seems as though the critic is assuming an implicit assent to such a practice, on the reader's part, but also presumably editors, who may even prefer the personal approach, which is seen in turn as more appealing to readers. The phenomenon seems especially noticeable online (even if its roots lie elsewhere), and to the extent that literary criticism eventually migrates entirely online, traditional exegetical literary criticism may be increasingly shoved aside.
Since academic criticism has long since abandoned disinterested literary analysis, general-interest publications are really the only venues available (aside from personal blogs) for critics who favor this approach. Without it, we could ask whether literary criticism still exists.
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