Symptoms of Symptoms

      The London Review of Books has a review of the 1960-2000 volume of The Oxford Literary History, and the review does a very good job of describing and characterising "academic criticism," at least as practiced by most these days and by the author of Oxford volume. I'm what might be described as an "old hat," one who still believes ultimately in textual intent and literary value, though I admit those matters need to be addressed with care and precision; a lot of current academic criticism reads like misdirected psychology and ponderous sociology, and reading some of the material excerpted form the Oxford, particularly the stuff on Larkin, is exasperating. So much contemporary criticism, when it's not obsessively fascinated by sex and sexuality, is more interested in minor intricacies of detail than it is in broader gestalts: it is, put another way, more interested in the incidental whelks than it is in the text's body proper, and the spirit within that body irrelevant. This makes the critics coroners and their analyses autopsical, and with the body dead there's little need to worry about the subject's well-being. It sounds like The Oxford is very much par for the course in current criticism. That's too bad, really too bad.