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What book criticism needs is a little respect, says book critic

Over the New Year’s weekend, The New York Times published a series of articles on the state of book criticism at the start of 2011. The general introduction to the series, which features articles by Kate Roiphe, Adam Kirsch, and Pankaj Mishra, among others, indicates that the intention was to isolate the rationale and impetus for serious criticism in an era of opinion: to separate “the critic interested in larger implications – aesthetic, cultural, moral” from the culture of “contentious assertion – of ‘love it’ or ‘hate it,’ of ‘wet kisses’ and ‘takedowns,’ of flattery versus snark, and assorted other verbal equivalents of the thumb held up or pointed down.”

One of the pieces in the series is by book critic Sam Anderson, who examines the way in which criticism through the ages has involved a conversation between texts: the text under review, other texts in the literary pantheon, and other critical works. Anderson asserts that one key feature of good criticism is that it must be well written: badly written criticism, Anderson suggests, is worse than “a badly written political speech or greeting card or poem; a badly written review is self-canceling, like a barber with a terrible haircut.”

Anderson goes on to say that if serious criticism is to matter in our media-saturated world, it must be accorded respect:

This means abandoning the notion that it’s just hack work or service journalism or literary bookkeeping, or a sad little purgatory for people who haven’t managed to succeed as novelists. Book criticism, done well, is an art of its own, with its own noble canon and creative challenges and satisfactions. In fact, it’s one of the essential literary arts, a singular genre in which a lot of great writers have done their best work.

Given that the “noble canon” to which Anderson refers includes Aristotle, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Martin Amis, and Joyce Carol Oates, among many others, one cannot help but agree.