Criticism of Criticism of Criticism

Disciplinary manifestos typically propose grand reconceptions or reorientations of the field. The work is not what we believe it to be; or if it is, it should be radically transformed.

I tend to be impatient with philosophers who operate in this mode. Their ethnography is often flawed—the discipline is more diverse and intellectually robust than they imagine—and they can be obtuse about more pressing dangers, more external than internal: they rise from the financial and political plight of higher education, not the methodological weakness of philosophy.

So I was happy to encounter Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth, an apology for the literary humanities as they now exist that responds to declining enrollments and disappearing jobs:

I don’t have a new method of reading to advertise, and I don’t want to tell critics to stop doing one thing in order to do something else. Rather, I want to provide an account of what we already do so as to advocate for its good standing. The book is a d…