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Originally Posted by Glice
Landfill academia is criminal; critical theory is not this. I could understand why some might think it's all shit, because a lot of it is, but I wouldn't write it off for a second. I'd also never talk about it here - this forum is barely baroque in terms of its understanding of the world.
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Critical Theory is valuable but it has been given an outageously over-inflated status within the humanities, facilitated to a large degree by the endless construction of straw man arguments aimed at discrediting rival positions.
Lurker's point isn't one that proposes mere literary appreciation but a far more subtle (and difficult) excercise in trying to work out what's really going on in a novel, or film or painting, which is something that critical theory simply isn't able to do - atleast very well, anyway. To a critical theorist, Poe and Lovecraft would by synonymous in that they'd both be reproducing the same ideology in the same way. And yet anyone who's read both would understand that they're enormously different. That's where the great literary critics are absolutely invaluable. Which isn't to say that a lot of these critics are even anti critical theory. Someone like Frank Kermode was instrumental in supporting ideas like structuralism at a time when they were treated by British academia with a deep level of suspicion. He respects its place but hardly ever uses it, much to the benefit of his books (most of which remain scandalously neglected by most humanities departments).