We discuss the following topics on this page:

• Introduction
• Critical Discourses
• Case Study: Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”
• The Stakes of Criticism
• Steps to Criticism
• Sample Criticism
• Takeaways

We also provide the following activities:

• Exercise

Introduction

Critique is something we do all the time when we consume media like books, television shows, movies, or online content. Critique just means we explain why something is good or bad, or why we like it or dislike it. The key to critique is to supply reasons for our judgment. The better the reasons, and the more we connect them to the text or to our experience of the text, the better the critique.

Critics aim to improve literature and many critics believe literature, in certain circumstances, can improve society. Literature is certainly about pleasure and displeasure, but it is also about what is true and false, and what is right and wrong. The “stakes” of criticism, therefore, are usually much higher than promoting or demoting a particular literary work. The larger aim of critique is to set a high bar for what counts as quality literature; the word “quality” can refer to form or structure, features, originality, purpose, function, effects, or any other aspect of a literary work.

Literary scholars often engage in critique, meaning they evaluate the quality of a literary work. Critique is not just a matter of personal opinion, though scholars can and do have personal preferences, because critique requires research into evaluative criteria and the particulars of each literary work. In addition, critique is comparative; it claims that a literary work is superior, inferior, or equal to another literary work. Critique is not just descriptive (i.e., detailing the features of a literary work); it is also prescriptive (i.e., it tells us what good literary writing should be). Students sometimes imagine that “critique” means finding things wrong with a piece of literature. It doesn’t have to be that at all. You can praise a work too. You just have to explain why it’s praise or blameworthy.

Literature can be critiqued using a vast number of criteria. For instance, a poem can be critiqued for its choice of subject and theme, setting, speaker, addressee, imagery, word choice, rhythm, sounds, repetition, form, structure, tone, pace, title, flow, use of irony, metaphor, allusion, and hundreds of other factors. Each poem can be compared to others in terms of originality, significance, artfulness, insightfulness, and power. To be an effective critic, you have to keep asking yourself and the text questions. The more questions you produce, the better. Another point is that you can evaluate not just the literary work but also your experience of the work. You can discuss whether you find pleasure in reading the work (a lack of pleasure doesn’t necessarily mean you had a bad experience or that the work is bad), difficulty, or emotions like apprehension, suspense, or satisfaction.

Many students are reticent to critique literary works, believing that art, like literature, should not be judged, or that all art is more or less equal, or that it is unfair to judge a work of art or an artist because it might hurt someone’s feelings or sensibilities. But these excuses for avoiding critique don’t really stand up for the simple reason that literary authors are themselves critical of their work. They read other authors’ works and determine for themselves what counts as good and what doesn’t. Most authors want to produce something “good” or “better,” whatever those terms mean to them. So if authors use critique to evaluate literature, surely critics can too.

Critical Discourses

Critics use a variety of critical discourses to evaluate literary works. These discourses contain values and sets of criteria that help us determine literary quality. Some critical discourses focus on social and political issues in and around the writing, while others focus on formal qualities of the writing itself: its structure, language, and themes. Many critics accept that literary form has political implications and that the two types of criticism – social and formal – can’t be easily separated.

We usually associate critical discourse with movements or theories. Movements include neoclassicism, romanticism, and modernism. Theories include New Criticism, reader response, and new historicism. Each movement and theory operates under a different set of principles and values about quality. A work that is “good” according to one theory may be bad in terms of another! To write criticism, you need to familiarize yourself with the concepts and criteria of a movement or theory and become adept at applying these concepts to literary works.

Just as critics evaluate literary works, critics also evaluate other works of criticism. One critic might say that another critic’s work is superficial, malicious, or just wrong. As a critic, you need to state your criteria explicitly. These criteria should apply not just to one work but to other works too – whether all literary works, works of the same genre, or works with similar purposes. For instance, you might claim that a good short story would be one that is relatable and has tension. Then you need to justify those criteria. Another critic might argue with the ones you provide and offer different ones. You need to be able to defend the criteria you provide.

Case Study: Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”

Let’s look at a famous poem by Ezra Pound that critics generally rate as extremely good and significant. The poem is very short – two lines (or three, if you include the title) – and Pound wrote his own piece of criticism about his work, explaining how the final version improved upon an earlier version.

Notice that in Pound’s commentary on his poem, he uses words that we typically use to evaluate things: words like “beautiful,” “vividly,” “pleasure,” “adequate,” and “bad.” When he describes his first attempt to write a poem that captured the feeling he had in the Metro, he critiques it as being a work “of second intensity.” It was Pound’s dissatisfaction with his own efforts that led him to keep going until he was satisfied with his work. Only at that point of satisfaction did he consider his poem to be finished.

Notice too that Pound criticizes other people for what he considers to be their inability to adequately critique what is new in art.

When I find people ridiculing the new arts, or making fun of the clumsy odd terms that we use in trying to talk of them amongst ourselves; when they laugh at our talking about the “ice-block quality” in Picasso, I think it is only because they do not know what thought is like, and they are familiar only with argument and gibe and opinion. That is to say, they can only enjoy what they have been brought up to consider enjoyable, or what some essayist has talked about in mellifluous phrases. They think only “the shells of thought,” as de Gourmont calls them; the thoughts that have been already thought out by others.

Here Pound is disagreeing with the critics who fault the art he likes; he basically says, “they don’t get it – because they are stuck in their old habits.”

Notice too that Pound is naming the kind of art he likes, referring to it as Imagism and Vorticism. By doing so, he is creating not just the categories of new art; he is also creating the language necessary to critique that art.

Pound is teaching us a valuable lesson here; the artist and the critic are partners working together to help audiences appreciate works of art. Sometimes this partnership exists within the same person (here, Pound assumes the roles of both poet and critic), and sometimes they are assumed by different people, as was the case with the critic Cleanth Brooks and the author William Faulkner.

The Stakes of Criticism

Good critics are good teachers. They perform a valuable role by helping writers and readers distinguish between good and bad literature. We might consider some literature to be “bad” because it doesn’t have a clear purpose, or because it aims for a bad purpose (such as misleading people). It can be bad because it has a good purpose but doesn’t achieve its aim; we might say of such works that the idea is ok but the writer failed in the execution.

For much of its early history, criticism was taught as a set of universal standards. Aristotle, one of the earliest and most important literary theorists, wrote a book called The Poetics. “Poetics” means “making,” and what Aristotle was aiming for was an account of how literature was made. The Poetics consisted of four smaller books on different literary genres: tragedy, comedy, epic and lyric. Of the original four, only three remain (the book on the comic genre was lost sometime in the middle ages).

While Aristotle’s Poetics appears to be mostly descriptive – accounting for the forms and functions of the various genres – many of the literary writers and critics who followed him used his work prescriptively. In other words, they used it to determine what was good literature (i.e., whatever adhered to Aristotle’s theory) and what was bad literature (i.e., whatever deviated from it) and encouraged writers to stick to the formulas.

Shifting from theory to criticism – in which the descriptive becomes prescriptive – is common in the field of literary studies. While it has helped writers and readers better understand literary arts, a problem with this approach is that it can result in the rejection of new works that don’t fit the constraints set by the theory. The long history of criticism in recent centuries has led to innovations, such as the appreciation of genres – like novels, short stories, and essays – that hadn’t yet been invented in Aristotle’s time, and shifted from “universal principles” of criticism to more situated ones.

This shift away from universalism resulted from a recognition that literature was not produced and consumed solely by a monolithic dominant culture, but also by people who had been historically marginalized. The literary “canon” – what is assumed to be the “best/most important” literature – has been expanded to include works by women authors, LGBTQ+ authors, and non-European and non-white authors. Key to the expansion of the literary canon was the work of critics who argued passionately that the standards of literary quality that had prevailed was, intentionally or not, excluding literature by these writers. New standards had to be articulated: ones that situated the writing of various cultures in their own terms.

The literary canon is a hotly contested subject because there is only so much room in it. The canon consists of works that are routinely included in anthologies and textbooks and in literature classes. A whole field of experts – scholars, critics, editors and publishers, teachers, and administrators – determines what is and isn’t in the canon. They present their cases for what should be included, excluded, added, or subtracted.

The argument over the canon is a very high stakes one, but not all literary criticism is about the canon. Criticism aims to shift our valuation of a literary work: to appreciate its virtues or to be wary of its shortcomings. Good criticism opens our minds to new possibilities for literature in general, and not just for a particular literary work. It is a key part of the literary world.

Steps to Criticism

The first thing a critic must do is establish criteria, which are standards of quality. Standards are words that denote particular qualities, which we put into columns that indicate good or bad – or better or worse. We can adopt critical standards from others, or we can make our own. Either way, we have to explain why we chose those standards and not others. Many critics begin their essays by contrasting their critical approach with those of another critic; they do so to establish that their critical approach has advantages over the other one. In other words, critics criticize other critics!

We might compare the work of the literary critic to that of a food critic. All food critics have standards about what is bad food (i.e., food that tastes so unpleasant that it is inedible) and what is good food (i.e., delicious!). Of course, food critics don’t just say “unpleasant” or “delicious” and call it a day. They use lots of words to indicate why something tastes unpleasant or delicious. And they use different criteria for different things; for instance, they have different standards for desserts than for salads. We don’t want to evaluate a salad by saying that it fails as a dessert (unless it was intended as a dessert).

Different cultures have their own standards for taste. For instance, in European cultures, insects are normally considered to be inedible. Yet 80% of the world’s population eats insects and people have criteria for what counts as the most delicious insects and the most delicious ways of preparing them. We don’t have to change our minds just because someone else likes something that we don’t, but we can learn that standards vary – and that people may heave excellent reasons for keeping those standards. In the next section of this chapter, we discuss intercultural competence, which is how we learn to shift perspectives and understand the values held by people with different cultural experiences.

The late 19th century English critic Matthew Arnold championed literary works that had “sweetness and light,” by which he meant beauty and intelligence. Such writing is likely to please most people. But one thing to know about literary criticism is that lots of “unpleasant” writing has earned praise from one literary critic or another. For example, the 20th century critic and author, Georges Bataille, praised writing that he called “heterogenous,” which he defined as non-productive, excessive, and “unassimilable” (which means something like “inedible”). His point was that such writing presented us with important knowledge about the world and about life. His own writing strikes most readers as scandalous and morbid, but his criticism explains and justifies his choices. Again, we don’t have to like it, but it helps to understand the claims he is making.

The second thing a critic needs to do is apply the critical standards to a case study: a particular literary work (or works). Criticism is often comparative, meaning that the critic will evaluate two or more works and discuss important qualitative differences between them. The critic will explain what a text does well and what it doesn’t do well, according to the critical standards.

Ultimately, the critic reminds the reader why they chose or invented the critical standards and why other critics should adopt them. It also explains why literature in general would improve if writers followed these criteria and why it would deteriorate if they don’t.

Sample Criticism

                           who
  a)s w(e loo)k
  upnowgath
                       PPEGORHRASS
                                                       eringint(o-
  aThe):l
               eA
                    !p:
S                                                                        a
                                      (r
  rIvInG                              .gRrEaPsPhOs)
                                                                         to
  rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
  ,grasshopper;

Exercise

1. Make a critique of the literary work below, a literary anecdote by Walter Benjamin, who was an early 20th century German-Jewish writer. What critical standards will you use? What do you need to know about Benjamin’s writing to adequately critique it?
   • Brief note: The Benjamin story seems to conceal as much as it reveals. There was an actual historical context for the story; Benjamin had gone to Riga, Latvia to meet Asja Lacis (who directed a children’s theater), but didn’t let her know he was coming. Both Walter and Asja were married to other people. Also, there had been actual shooting in Riga recently. Notice that the main “action” of the story – the narrator seeing the woman or she seeing him – is in the conditional verb tense, meaning it might happen but has not actually happened.