Smart words from James Wood on the yawning gap between writers and critics:

Writers and literary academics have never been closer, and never further apart. Since the New Criticism of the 1950s, there have been two developments that should be contradictory but whose agreement in fact makes gloomy sense. On the one hand, for the first time in history, many poets and novelists are graduates of English studies, many of them put through the theory machine for good measure. Writers and academics teach together, attend conferences together, and sometimes almost speak the same language (Rushdie's essays and academic post-colonialist discourse; DeLillo's fiction and academic postmodern critique). But during the same period, literary criticism as a discourse available for, and even attractive to, the common reader has all but disappeared. Literature as criticism - DeLillo's knowing essayism, Rushdie's parables about hybridity, Franzen's postmodern riffs - has burgeoned, while criticism as literature, what R.P. Blackmur called 'the formal discourse of an amateur', has faded.

This ought not to be possible. If all those clever writers studied other writers at university, they should, in addition to producing fiction and poetry, be writing capacious essays for the mythical common reader. We should be awash in V.S. Pritchetts and Edmund Wilsons. There are many reasons why this is not so. The audience for such essays is probably smaller than it was, and certainly less cohesive. The growth of the canon, and changing attitudes about elite culture, make the top-down instruction provided with such grumpy relish by Wilson problematic. But the chief reason is that the academy won: it was not writers who changed literary criticism, but academic criticism that changed literary criticism. It made it, precisely, more academic. Theory, metalled with its own unforgiving dialects, certainly proved a difficult road for many untutored readers. But theory is not the culprit, rather the symptom of a steady academicising. That theory is not per se the problem we can deduce from the many writers who have studied it, absorbed its findings, and emerged undamaged (i.e. emerged writers and not academics).

This absence of a general, non-academic literary criticism is the speaking void which tells us that writers, though apparently closer than ever to academics, are actually miles from them. The void is the public space that might have been. Many contemporary writers are familiar with the procedures of post-structuralism and deconstruction. They can talk about decentred texts and self-reflexive narration; they acknowledge that a text has an unconscious, and that it can be read against the grain of its author's apparent intentions. They see that Eminem's lyrics might be a 'text' in the way that Middlemarch is a text. They are often keener than many scholars to open up the canon. But they diverge from most academic critics, theoretical or otherwise, in two massive areas: intention and value.

Most writers I know treat an author's intentions - or their understanding of them - with severe respect. Better than anyone else, they know that a work of art means more than its creator intended it to mean, that artworks live what Montale called 'the second life of art' with their readers. But their criticism, spoken or written, tends to hug authorial intention rather closely; and writers, in my experience, are often suspicious of the way academic criticism confounds or even nullifies authorial intention in pursuit of the symptomatic. In his new book, After Theory, Terry Eagleton describes two camps, the belletristic and the theoretical. Why is it, he asks, that the former is credited with seeing what is 'really in the text'? 'To see The Waste Land as brooding upon the spiritual vacancy of Man without God is to read what is there on the page, whereas to view it as a symptom of an exhausted bourgeois civilisation in an era of imperialist warfare is to impose your own crankish theory on the poem.' It's a caricature - theoretical Eagleton turns out to be fonder of crude binarisms than the crustiest old clubman - but a writer would be very wary of a criticism that only wanted to read The Waste Land symptomatically. Not to attend to a plausible reconstruction of the author's aesthetic intentions is not to attend to the made-ness, the constructedness, of the artwork; and writers, sensibly enough, have a great deal invested in such matters.

Value follows intention. There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work - is it any good? - is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations. To the academy, much of this value-chat looks like, and can indeed be, mere impressionism. Again, theory is not the only culprit. A good deal of postmodern thought is suspicious of the artwork's claim to coherence, and so is indifferent or hostile to the discussion of its formal success. But conventional, non-theoretical criticism often acts as if questions of value are irrelevant, or canonically settled. To spend one's time explaining how a text works is not necessarily ever to talk about how well it works, though it might seem that the latter is implicit in the former. Who bothers, while teaching The Portrait of a Lady for the nth time, to explain to a class that it is a beautiful book? But it would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that, for most writers, greedy to learn and emulate, this is the only important question.

I think, actually, that the whole literary enterprise has been hijacked -- I don't know if you can blame academic English departments per se, because a Thoreau, a Melville, a Mark Twain, or even a Sinclair Lewis would simply ignore professors, or make fun of them. Some have been blaming MFA programs, too -- on my site yesterday I have a quote and a link to New Partisan and a post that says Tom Wolfe and a bunch of other second-rank figures like Woody Allen never went through MFA programs, but second-rank writers aren't an example of anything much, and the NP post ignores Flannery O'Connor, who is probably a better writer than any on the list New Partisan cites, but DID go through an MFA program. The question is what happened to first rank writers? We don't even have a Sinclair Lewis, and haven't had one since he died.

Certainly the academic world is part of the problem, but only part of it, and it's also a problem because writers let it. It seems to me that some of the academic subjects bloggers have covered for the past year, like the inherent injustice of adjuncting, the futility of grad school, and so forth, are past their sell-by date. I've begun to chase the question of what happened to real writing on my site, in addition to posting some real writing as well.

I went and read the original piece -- Erin, though, got the best part. On a day's reflection, I think the piece is remarkably uninformed. The writer postulates that the New Criticism somehow changed the literary landscame about 1950, when writers and critics began to associate with each other. Poppycock. F.Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson were schoolmates at Princeton. Robert Frost attended Dartmouth College (briefly) and Harvard (longer) and subsequently taught at both institutions (John Updike said in a New Yorker piece that Frost probably knew better Latin and Greek than T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound). Thomas Wolfe got an MA in Literature at Harvard and was what we would probably call an adjunct at NYU, where he taught English. It's good the author didn't submit this as an undergraduate paper!

I think the type of criticism the author of the piece misses has shifted venues. The writing on popular music by Dave Marsh, Craig Werner, Nelson George, Eric Alterman, Greil Marcus, etc. etc. covers (no pun intended) much of what the author seems to miss the most