Author

In my two previous lectures, I have been talking about what happens to our conception of literature if we allow biography and history to encroach on its just domains, or if we allow a preoccupation with what various readers make of it to determine its meaning and value.

In my previous lecture I distinguished four areas of emphasis in literary criticism, but I discussed only two of these: criticism that is focused upon the literary work as an organism or a structure–some sort of verbal entity, give it whatever more precise term you may choose–and criticism that is concerned primarily with the author himself, whether the critic stresses his personal history or the various cultural forces that formed him.

A colleague of mine has recently published a book which he calls Criticism in the Wilderness. I am not surprised at his title. He might well have decided to call it Criticism on the Battlefield, for ours is a day in which the critics, notoriously a splenetic lot at best, have at each other with hammer and tongs.