Is literary criticism still relevent?

Literary criticism is one of those subjects that only gets attention in the world of colleges and universities. Even there, however, the attention is scant, and mostly given by English professors and grad students.  There might be a handful of undergrad English majors who have an affinity for theory (I did), but most are content with creative writing and reading contemporary literature (sadly, even classics are getting less attention than they once did).

The debate about the utility of studying literary criticism is nothing new. What most people don’t realize, though, is that even avid, recreational readers engage in some form of criticism every time they form an opinion about a text. And those opinions can be classified into different schools of thought. Some people will read a text and see nothing but sexist characters that try to destroy the feminine. This is called feminist theory. Others might read the same text and read it in the context of its historical significance.
There are many other schools of thought. A few people stay strictly within the context of one of these schools. A majority, however, tend to move around the literary spectrum.

Thus one of the problems with criticism emerges. Literature always seems to be studied as something else: history, psychology, socialism, etc. I came across an interesting article from the Times Online which takes excerpts from the journal of a young PhD student in the UK who, sadly, committed suicide. He wrote about this very idea of studying literature as something else:

People who study only literature generally become pseudo-historians or pseudo-psychologists, imitators of the analytical mode they feel they can apply. I am acutely aware that, after three years of study, I am expert at nothing.

I can second this observation. After four years of studying literature at a large state university, I learned how to analyze literature in many different ways. But when I was finally awarded my degree last May, I found myself an expert at nothing.

This doesn’t mean that a literary education doesn’t have its benefits. As a short aside, studying literature at the college level gives one excellent analytical and critical thinking skills, not to mention the writing part of the degree. Those are all skills that can transfer to just about any job in any industry. So one needs to look at the big picture of a liberal arts education, not just the specifics being studied.

I’ll write more about the benefits and drawbacks of an English degree in a later post. But studying literature as literature is hard, if not downright impossible. It’s hard to study characters and their motivation without getting into psychology. Likewise, studying the setting could easily involve a deep understanding of history and/or politics, especially if the text was written long enough ago to be considered "classic". If one wants to study literature without bringing in outside subjects, then one must stick to the text and not making any assumptions beyond what is already written.

So why bother with literary criticism at all? It can appear to be nothing more than a self-serving line of study that is promoted by college professor’s who’s very job depends on the "legitimacy" of criticism. Answering this question is no easy task, and many have made an entire career trying to answer, or at least justify, this question. Thus I’m not going to pretend to have the answer, but my own opinion is that there will always be criticism as long as there is written text. It is human nature to try to understand things beyond what is just "there". Criticism is an extension of that idea.

"Every life is a tragedy"

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