Adam Kirsch Reviews A.O. Scott's 'Better Living Through Criticism'

In 1948, Stanley Edgar Hyman, best remembered today as the husband of the writer Shirley Jackson, published a book titled The Armed Vision, a survey of contemporary literary criticism. Remarkably, Hyman was no scholar—he was a staffer at The New Yorker—and he was writing for a popular audience, not an academic one. The hundreds of thousands of readers who made best-sellers of books like Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, or Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle could turn to The Armed Vision (a paperback!) to learn who was who in what Randall Jarrell, himself an important critic, wryly called “The Age of Criticism.” Hyman wasn’t writing just criticism, he was writing criticism of criticism; yet he did so with a conviction that he was performing a primary literary activity.

Jarrell was complaining about the Age of Criticism, not praising it. He deplored the way ambitious young people, in the mid-20th century, wanted to write criticism instead of novels and poems. He complained that the critics’ consensus narrowed the range of literary discussion, so that everyone was constantly talking about the same half-dozen canonical books. But as Jarrell also said, in a golden age, everyone goes around complaining about how yellow everything looks. I don’t think he would have been happier in our own time, when serious criticism is increasingly thin on the ground, even as various other technologies of ranking and assessment proliferate. And it’s not just literary criticism that has changed: Few if any critics today have the charisma of Kael and Farber, Bangs and Willis.

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