Visited the library today for a collection of essays by L. C. Knights, twentieth-century critic-at-large, who died 12 years ago at the age of 91 (these long-lived Englishmen!). He helped found the take-no-prisoners literary journal Scrutiny, and, according to the DNB, "enjoyed pronouncing the title ‘Scrrrutiny’, with its suitably rasping sound." Back in 1934, in an essay called "Shakespeare and the Shakespeareans," he outlined precisely what I despise about modern literary criticism:

"Mr. [T. S.] Eliot is the only contributor to the book [A Companion to Shakespeare Studies] to ask, or imply, the important question, 'Why should we read what has been written about Shakespeare?' And this, of course, in a world of obvious and urgent duties and distractions, involves some further questions: 'Why should we read Shakespeare? Why should we read poetry at all?' If a centralizing conception of poetry and its function is lacking in this book, this is not because it is by fourteen different writers, but because Shakespeare studies, in common with other intellectual pursuits, have suffered from the decay of a unifying tradition - have, in consequence, lost their life in becoming a specialism, or a collection of specialisms, with their own codes and standards. Whilst the tradition was alive, the answers to our questions were implicit within it. Some of the eighteenth-century critics were unimportant enough, but almost any paragraph of their work implies a social and moral world; and their appeal is to this world, not to 'workers in the same field.'"

This was 75 years ago; one can only imagine what Knights would say about today's academy. How odd that so many scholars agree with him, and not one can figure out how to alter the status quo.

(Knights also dismissed Restoration comedy as "trivial, gross, and dull," but no critic is perfect.)