Literary criticism

Based on Wikipedia: Literary criticism

Here's a question that sounds simple but isn't: when you read a book and decide whether you liked it, what exactly are you doing?

You're practicing literary criticism. So am I. So is everyone who's ever said "that ending felt rushed" or "I couldn't connect with the characters." The difference between casual readers and professional critics isn't that one group judges books and the other doesn't—it's how systematic they are about it, and whether anyone pays them for their opinions.

The Ancient Roots of Arguing About Stories

Literary criticism has been around for about as long as literature itself. In the fourth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote a work called the Poetics—essentially the first attempt to create a framework for understanding what makes stories work.

Two concepts from that ancient text still shape how we talk about literature today. The first is mimesis, the idea that art imitates life. The second is catharsis—that peculiar emotional release we feel when a tragedy unfolds on stage or page. When you cry at the end of a sad movie and somehow feel better for it, you're experiencing exactly what Aristotle was describing twenty-four centuries ago.

For nearly two thousand years after Aristotle, literary criticism was largely the province of religious scholars. This makes sense when you think about it: the most important texts in medieval European, Jewish, and Islamic cultures were sacred ones. The techniques developed to interpret the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran—careful parsing of language, attention to multiple layers of meaning, debates about authorial intent—would eventually be applied to secular literature as well.

Arabic literary criticism flourished in the ninth century, centuries before its European counterpart. A scholar named Al-Jahiz wrote influential works analyzing rhetoric and argumentation, while Abdullah ibn al-Mu'tazz developed the concept of badi—the study of literary devices and ornamentation in Arabic poetry. These thinkers were wrestling with questions about what makes writing beautiful and effective at a time when much of Europe was still emerging from intellectual dormancy.

The Renaissance: When Critics Discovered Rules

The Renaissance changed everything.

In 1498, a Latin translation of Aristotle's Poetics became widely available in Europe. Suddenly, intellectuals had access to what they considered the ultimate guide to artistic excellence. The result was literary neoclassicism—a movement obsessed with rules, unity, and the idea that ancient writers had figured out the correct formulas for good literature.

Renaissance critics believed that great works should maintain unity of form and content. A tragedy should focus on a single action, occurring in roughly real-time, in one location. These "three unities"—action, time, and place—became something like commandments. Breaking them was considered not just a stylistic choice but a moral failing.

The Italian critic Lodovico Castelvetro published an enormously influential commentary on Aristotle's Poetics in 1570, cementing these principles for generations of European writers and critics. Literature was seen as central to culture itself, and authors were entrusted with preserving a long tradition stretching back to the ancients.

The Baroque Rebellion

Rules, of course, are made to be broken.

By the seventeenth century, a new sensibility was emerging that valued exactly what the classicists despised: excess, transgression, the startling and extreme. This was the Baroque aesthetic, and it represented the first major crisis in Western artistic thought since antiquity.

Where classical critics prized proportion, harmony, and decorum, Baroque thinkers celebrated the concetto—the ingenious conceit that surprises and delights. They valued acutezza and ingegno—wit and cleverness—and sought to produce meraviglia: wonder.

In 1654, an Italian writer named Emanuele Tesauro published Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope). The title is wonderfully ironic—it claims to build on Aristotle while actually subverting everything the neoclassicists held dear. Tesauro argued that metaphor wasn't just a decorative flourish but a kind of universal language, a way of accessing truth that went beyond literal statement.

This was radical stuff. It meant that the wildest poetic flights weren't failures to follow the rules but were actually superior to rule-bound writing.

When Everyone Started Reading

Something fundamental shifted in the eighteenth century: ordinary people began reading for fun.

Before the Enlightenment, literacy was largely the domain of the wealthy and the scholarly. Books were expensive, reading was seen as either educational or religious, and the idea of curling up with a story purely for entertainment would have struck most people as bizarre.

But as printing became cheaper and literacy rates climbed, a new reading public emerged. And this public didn't necessarily care about the three unities or Aristotelian principles. They wanted to be entertained.

Literary criticism responded by becoming more accessible too. Reviews appeared not just in scholarly treatises but in magazines, newspapers, and journals aimed at general readers. Critics began to shape public taste in ways that would have been impossible when books circulated only among the elite.

This democratization had its discontents. Many intellectuals worried that the literary marketplace was degrading culture. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, now considered a masterpiece, was attacked by contemporary critics—one described it as "the detestable story of the Yahoos." The Enlightenment dream of literature educating the masses sometimes seemed to be drowning in a sea of popular entertainment.

Sound familiar? The anxieties about mass culture that still animate debates about television, video games, and social media have roots going back three centuries.

The Romantics: Beauty in Darkness

The early nineteenth century brought another revolution. The British Romantic movement challenged the assumption that literature should depict only the beautiful, noble, and perfect. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and their compatriots argued that literature could find sublimity in common subjects—that a simple flower or a conversation with a beggar could be as profound as a Greek epic.

German Romanticism, developing slightly later, went even further. These thinkers embraced fragmentation and incompleteness, finding beauty in what classical aesthetics would have considered flaws. They valued Witz—a kind of intellectual humor and playfulness—more highly than the serious, earnest tone of English Romantic poetry.

By the late nineteenth century, some writers were becoming more famous for their criticism than for their creative work. Matthew Arnold, for instance, is remembered today primarily as a critic and essayist, though he also wrote poetry. The critic was becoming a cultural figure in his own right, not just a commentator on other people's work.

The Twentieth Century: Revolution and Counter-Revolution

If you want to understand how literary criticism is practiced today, you need to understand what happened in the early twentieth century. This is when everything we've discussed so far was essentially swept away and replaced with something radically new.

Two movements emerged almost simultaneously: Russian Formalism in the Soviet Union and the New Criticism in Britain and America. Despite developing independently and in very different political contexts, they shared a revolutionary premise: the only thing that matters about a literary work is the text itself.

This sounds obvious now, but it was genuinely shocking. Previous criticism had been deeply interested in authors—their biographies, their psychology, their intentions. The New Critics called this the "intentional fallacy": the mistaken belief that knowing what an author meant to say helps you understand what the text actually says. They had an equally dismissive term for criticism focused on how readers react to texts: the "affective fallacy."

What remained was "close reading"—careful, detailed attention to the words on the page. How is this sentence constructed? What metaphors does this poem use? How do the parts of this novel fit together? Questions about the author's life or the reader's feelings were considered beside the point, almost embarrassingly irrelevant.

This approach dominated English-speaking literary criticism for decades. Its influence persists even among critics who explicitly reject its premises—the habit of close textual analysis is now so ingrained in literary training that it's hard to imagine criticism without it.

Theory Arrives

The New Criticism's dominance began crumbling in the late 1960s, and what replaced it was something far stranger: theory.

"Theory" in literary studies doesn't mean what it means in science—a well-tested explanation for observed phenomena. Instead, it refers to a body of philosophical thought, largely European in origin, that treats literature as a site for exploring fundamental questions about language, meaning, power, and identity.

First came structuralism, which borrowed ideas from linguistics to analyze literature as a system of signs and conventions. Then came post-structuralism, which turned structuralism against itself, arguing that the stable meanings structuralists claimed to find were actually illusions. Deconstruction, associated primarily with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, became famous (or notorious) for demonstrating that texts could be read against themselves, that their apparent meanings contained contradictions and absences that undermined their surface claims.

By the 1980s and 1990s, university literature departments were embroiled in what became known as the "theory wars." On one side were critics who embraced theoretical approaches—Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, post-colonial criticism, psychoanalytic criticism. On the other were traditionalists who saw theory as an abandonment of literature itself, a substitution of obscure French philosophy for the genuine pleasures of reading.

The Canadian critic Northrop Frye had anticipated some of these debates in his 1957 book Anatomy of Criticism. Frye observed that critics often judge literary works based on whether they conform to the critic's ideology—whether they express the "right" values about politics, gender, religion, or society. This observation cuts both ways: it's equally applicable to conservative critics who dismiss transgressive literature and progressive critics who condemn works for failing to meet contemporary moral standards.

Where Things Stand Now

The theory wars are largely over, and the result is something like a truce. Contemporary literature departments contain critics working in wildly different traditions. Some still practice close reading in something like the New Critical mode. Others engage primarily with theoretical texts, treating literature as raw material for philosophical argument. Many move fluidly between approaches depending on what serves their purposes.

The range of what counts as worthy of critical attention has expanded enormously. The traditional literary canon—the "great books" that educated people were expected to know—still matters, but critics now also write seriously about popular genres, comic books, television shows, and video games. Feminist criticism, once marginal, has transformed how we read both women's writing and writing about women. Ecocriticism examines literature's relationship to the natural world. Postcolonial criticism explores how literature participated in and resisted imperial domination. Queer theory investigates sexuality and gender in texts from every era.

There's even a field called "Darwinian literary studies" that analyzes literature through the lens of evolutionary psychology, asking how our evolved cognitive and emotional systems shape both the creation and reception of stories. And "postcritique" seeks to move beyond the suspicious, adversarial reading practices that dominated theory, asking whether there might be more generous, appreciative ways to engage with texts.

What Literary Criticism Is For

So we return to the question we started with: what are you doing when you decide whether you like a book?

You're participating in a conversation that has been going on for millennia. You're applying standards that you may not even be consciously aware of—standards shaped by everything from ancient Greek philosophy to twentieth-century academic debates. You're asking questions about form and content, about meaning and intention, about pleasure and significance.

The professional critics disagree about almost everything, but they share one assumption: that it matters how we read. Literature isn't just entertainment, though it can certainly entertain. It's a technology for transmitting experience across time and space, for making the inner lives of others accessible to us. How we interpret that technology—what we look for, what we value, what we argue about—shapes what literature can do for us.

Reading books you don't like, as the Substack author suggests, really is an excellent exercise in understanding your own taste. But understanding why you respond to certain books also means understanding a long history of people arguing about what makes literature good, what it should do, and why it matters. Those ancient questions are still alive in every book review, every classroom discussion, every conversation that begins "I just finished this book and I have to talk about it."

The conversation continues. You're part of it now.