What Kind of Person Should the Critic Be?

Grimble, Simon

Abstract

In his essay “On Translating Homer” (1861), Matthew Arnold wrote that “the critic […] should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the most free, flexible, and plastic spirit imaginable […].” To our contemporary culture such characterizations can seem very presumptuous. Yet normative ideas about what kind of person the critic should be are actually not so easy to escape: this essay will examine recent debates on these issues through analysis of such texts as Rita Felski’s Limits of Critique (2015) and Joseph North’s Literary Criticism (2017). The essay ends by arguing that the condition of literary criticism will be helped by its practitioners thinking more frankly and more directly about what kinds of values they are trying to embody in their own practices.

Citation

Grimble, S. (2021). What Kind of Person Should the Critic Be?. In A. Sridhar, M. A. Hosseini, & D. Attridge (Eds.), The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century (173-191). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71139-9_9

• Online Publication Date: May 18, 2021
• Publication Date: May 18, 2021
• Deposit Date: Nov 20, 2024
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 173-191
• Book Title: The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century
• ISBN: 9783030711382
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71139-9_9
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3101860