Two Roads for the Literary Critical Elite

An Essay on the State of Criticism Today

Willem de Kooning, Judgment Day, 1946, Oil and charcoal on paper

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The idea that literary criticism is not merely a secondary reflection about literature but an autonomous form of intellectual and aesthetic production has deep roots in Western thought dating back at least to the Enlightenment. Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism,” published in 1711, marks a pivotal moment in this history, treating criticism not only as an evaluative practice but as a public and philosophical engagement with literature. Periodically since then we’ve been told — unsurprisingly, mostly by critics — that we’re living in a “golden age” of criticism.

Such an age is currently upon us, according to author and critic Ryan Ruby, who announced that we are living in a “golden age of popular criticism.”¹ In the 2023 essay that followed this claim, “A Golden Age?,” Ruby argues that despite the deep pessimism about contemporary cultural production, we are living in an age in which “criticism is being practiced and received as an artform in its own right.” In his view, criticism has become a genre of artistic production, one capable of delivering aesthetic experiences akin to fiction.

These propositions are appealing — certainly to critics — but debatable, as I’ll show below. However, before proceeding, it is worth considering Ruby’s assertion about a golden age with some historical perspective. For he is not the first to propose this, nor is the framing of his proposition particularly original. His ideas about a golden age and criticism are, in fact, similar to those made by W. J. T. Mitchell, former editor of the journal Critical Inquiry and professor at the University of Chicago, in his landmark essay “The Golden Age of Criticism: Seven Theses and a Commentary,” published in the London Review of Books in 1987.

Mitchell’s first thesis states: “We live in a golden age of criticism. The dominant mode of literary expression in the late 20th century is not poetry, fiction, drama, film, but criticism and theory.” Mitchell does not set out to demonstrate the validity of this thesis — or any of those that follow, including several that Ruby will reprise in his essay — in any rigorous formal manner, but provides discourse around each of them. He suggests, for example, that: “The ‘seriousness’ of contemporary criticism is . . . a function of its cognitive claims to truth, discipline, method and professional rigor, and its desire for change, disruption and reformation by the destruction of false forms of discipline, method and rigor.”

Mitchell’s essay provides a historiographic critique and meditation about the anxiety and status of literary criticism in the university — already under duress in the 1980s. Unlike Ruby, Mitchell treats the idea of a golden age ironically: He sees it as a rhetorical trope, one that can be used to idealize or criticize the past as well as celebrate the present. He helps us understand that any purported golden age is a function of discourse, not of history. If criticism is in a golden age, he implies, it is because it has the power to represent itself as having one, not because it is necessarily in one — because by the time that is noted, it may already be over.

Now, as often as criticism has been declared to be in a golden age, and perhaps as a corollary, it has been held to be in crisis. Across centuries of self-reflection about the practice of criticism, the critic Andrea Long Chu notes in “Criticism in a Crisis,” the opening chapter of her 2025 book of essays, Authority, that critics, “when they sat down to write about the state of their art, each of them concluded that criticism was in the midst of a terrible crisis that bore the unmistakable signature of their exact historical moment.” A proposition with which Mitchell would more than likely agree.

In addition to championing a golden age, Ruby also believes that literary studies and criticism are in a state of crisis. In his next essay, “Criticism as a Way of Life,” he cites the causes for this crisis, including “the instrumentalization of education under the pressure of skyrocketing tuition; and a loss of prestige, authority, and methodological self-confidence relative to STEM departments.” He is not alone in pointing this out. In fact, his thinking about these causative factors parallels Jonathan Kramnick, a professor of English at Yale University. In his 2023 book Criticism & Truth, Kramnick set out to defend criticism, seeking to justify its value because “the discipline of literary studies in particular has understood itself to be in the decline relative both to its former stature and to what we now call the STEM disciplines.”

Kramnick doesn’t opine on whether he thinks we’re in a golden age, but he shares with Ruby the same concerns and anxiety about the diminishing institutional status of the humanities and the role of the literary critic — and criticism — both in academia and public-facing, or so-called popular, criticism. However, their ideas about what to do about the crisis differ dramatically.²

While Kramnick believes the situation can be saved by reviving the practice of close reading (more on this below), Ruby presents a rhetorically compelling but ultimately unconvincing critique of Kramnick’s position and offers as an alternative his idea of “criticism as an artform.” The difference between their positions, examined in this essay, revolves around the tension between the epistemic and artistic aims of criticism: Should criticism aim to produce knowledge or aesthetic experience?

In his golden age essay, Ruby writes: “What the exemplary critical essays of the present day have in common is that they are received as literary art, providing an aesthetic experience closer to fiction than to a consumer report or even to scholarship.” While flattering to critics, this proposition is problematic, to wit: What is the definition of an “exemplary” critical essay? What does “closer to fiction” mean? And who exactly receives these essays as “literary art”? Ruby doesn’t define what he means by “literary art” or what receiving criticism as literary art would mean, other than to say receiving criticism in “that sense” — as literary art — provides an aesthetic experience “closer to fiction” — which is a literary art — which makes his argument circular and invalid.

Ruby then trots out the names of 50 critics whom he says “have produced excellent essays in English about literature in non-academic venues” over the last six years. He lists the usual suspects in the world of Anglo-American criticism that many readers of this essay will likely recognize. It is interesting, if not ironic, that at least one of the 50 critics, Andrea Long Chu, vehemently disagrees with his assessment of the quality of current criticism. In Authority, she writes that: “It is true that of the criticism being published today, a little is excellent, a little more is adequate, and the lion’s share is a dog’s breakfast.”

Putting aside the dissent for a moment, Ruby’s rhetorical appeal to quantity is a weak, if not invalid, argument since the number of examples of something does not imply or prove its quality, nor does it prove that criticism is an art form. The 50 critics he names in all likelihood produced many of the 21 essays and reviews that he listed on Twitter — and if my memory serves me correctly, they did — and therefore it is understandable that the essays were “warmly received,” since the audience included the authors of the 21 essays as well as their fans. Many of the critics that Ruby names might, upon being queried, state that they do, in fact, believe they are practicing “criticism as an artform,” but even such an admission from them doesn’t mean, or imply, that readers read them that way. Whether the 21 essays can be considered as “art forms” remains a question open to debate.

Ruby believes that in the last five years or so, there has emerged “a public that is not merely a readership, but a ‘connoisseurship’, often reading critical essays for their own sake, and not necessarily as gateways into the books which have occasioned them.” That is, they consider these essays as texts, for lack of a better word, that can be appreciated on their own. A proposition with which I think we can agree. However, readers have been reading critical essays for their own sake for years, but that does not mean all criticism read that way is ipso facto an art form.

More contentiously, Ruby claims that Twitter has contributed to the rise of the golden age of criticism, saying it “is indispensable for the transmission of criticism today.” “Indispensable” is an unfortunate word choice since there are other publicly available platforms where readers and writers, critics and public intellectuals can interact. It is stretching the truth beyond recognition to say that “the critical essay flourishes on a platform like Twitter” because, in fact, critical essays do not appear on Twitter, — only, at best, links to them, which are often suppressed by the platform’s algorithm. Additionally, posts on Twitter, as we can all attest, can quickly devolve into ad hominem attacks, snark, insult, and name calling. Which has led many writers to vastly curtail what they upload to the platform or to abandon it altogether, as Ruby himself has done.

Ruby writes that the “micro-genres such as the blurb, the take, the thread, and the reply” improve the way critical essays are written. A counterpoint to this idea can be found in Louis Bury’s 2017 essay “Topical Criticism and the Cultural Logic of the Quick Take”. Ruby, in fact, quotes Bury in defense of his thesis about a golden age, since Bury like Ruby does say in his essay: “It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to flatter ourselves that we live in a golden era of literary criticism.” Ruby drafts Bury to shore up his position about Twitter, saying of him: “Bury credits the internet with extending ‘the popular reach of book culture,’ in part by providing academics with venues and permission to write for audiences of non-specialists in salutary and discerning ways.”

Bury does talk about “the popular reach of book culture,” but the quote Ruby uses is cherry-picked. In fact, Ruby misrepresents Bury’s position about the internet. It is true, Bury points out, that the internet has extended the popular reach of book culture and public-facing criticism. He cites The Millions, LARB, n+1, etc. Ruby fails to mention that Bury cautions that the “cultural logic of responsiveness,” due to its increased visibility on the internet, has led to the development of counterproductive habits such as rapid “critical takes.” This rush to judgment offers an opportunity to create a “veneer of authority” that critics use to try to raise their visibility. He warns that this kind of topical criticism from the “connoisseurship” may have its place but — agreeing with Mitchell — Bury says: “Scholarship constitutes the researched ideal toward which, in a perfect world, all criticism would tend: thorough, rigorous, complete.” Thus, the type of criticism that Ruby champions on Twitter is not to be condoned because, Bury says: “The endpoint of a literary critical culture that values speed, blunt declaration, and immediate answers above all else would constitute the op-ed-ification of that culture. It would be a digital newspaper stand whose ‘content’ — as opposed to ‘ideas’ — was overstuffed with works of scattershot context, Swiss cheese logic, and rhetorical grandstanding.” This is exactly what we find on X today.

In the closing paragraph of “A Golden Age?,” Ruby concludes with the point that seems to have been the goal of his essay: Critics should be designated as artists because what they produce is an art form.

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Since its publication, Kramnick’s Criticism & Truth has been a stalking horse used to continue the debates about the function, methods, and value of literary criticism and its place in the university. Echoing Mitchell’s position that criticism has “cognitive claims to truth,” Kramnick argues that criticism “is capable in some fashion of telling truths about the world itself, not just the small piece of it called literature.” He maintains that “close reading” is the method that best accomplishes this. Close reading is “writing about writing,” and when done skillfully it “makes something new in the act of interpreting it.”

Kramnick argues that the technique or craft of close reading produces knowledge and truths about literature that are on par with the kinds of truths that practitioners of other disciplines generate in order to “claim relevance for interpretive work at a moment of crisis for the discipline’s footing in the academy and the academy’s footing in the world.” Ruby argues in “Criticism as a Way of Life” that interpretations generated by close reading are “truth-bearing according to other criteria than those of the hard or social sciences” and maintains that Kramnick fails to prove “close reading is a form of knowledge production.”

It is, I think, generally agreed upon that literature reflects truths about the world. Our belief that this is so undoubtedly influences our thinking about criticism, inclining us to suppose that a technique like close reading — that takes literature as its object and accounts for its meaning — should also be able to produce truths about it, because what “it means” we normally take to be true. However, the demonstration of this has not yet been convincingly presented. Thus, while Ruby is right in saying that Kramnick’s argument is not dispositive in demonstrating that close reading produces truths, this does not negate the proposition that close reading does produce knowledge. It is the status of this knowledge that remains in question.³

Ruby would like to dismiss close reading as a methodology to clear a path for his thesis that “criticism is more similar to fiction; creative both in method and in outcome.” Unable to prove this through a formal argument, he presents an appeal to authority to make his case. Thus, halfway through the essay, to bolster support for his idea, he quotes Friedrich Schlegel who in a grandiloquent — not to mention bombastic —declaration, stated: “The work of criticism is superfluous unless it is itself a work of art as independent of the work it criticizes as that is independent of the materials that went into it.” Ruby goes on to cite a wide array of literary luminaries who, over the years, have also endorsed the view that criticism is an independent art form in its own right — including Oscar Wilde, who famously declared that critics should be considered artists in his 1891 tract “The Critic as Artist.” This genre of creative criticism, says Ruby, eschews expository writing and constitutes a counter-canon.

Ruby hopes to demonstrate that if these counter-canon critics are producing works of art, then they must be artists, because that is of course what artists do. He believes creative criticism will survive the collapse of the humanities in the universities. As he noted in his golden age essay: “One constant over the course of the past two hundred and fifty years is that because their work is not in the final analysis tied to market incentives, artists, and this I hope you’ll now agree is a designation that includes critics among their ranks, always find a way to make art.”

To convince us that this special form of criticism can be written and is being written today, he puts forth someone he claims is the premier practitioner of the form — one of the 50 critics he says produced excellent essays about literature — the critic, essayist, and art historian, A. V. Marraccini.

Ruby lauds A. V. Marraccini’s 2023 book We the Parasites, calling it “as fine an example of criticism that is both creative in method and in outcome as has been produced during the overlapping ‘golden era’ and ‘crisis of the humanities.’” In The Millions, Ruby gushes that the book is:​ “Quite simply the most intellectually stimulating reading experience, in any genre, I had this year. Part critical manifesto, part natural history, part sentimental education, We the Parasites represents a genuine breakthrough in our understanding of what criticism is and how it can be written, answering, at long last, Sontag’s call for an ‘erotics of art.’ It is destined to become a classic and I will not stop talking about it until it does.”​ If that weren’t sufficient praise, he also blurbed the book, saying it “restores art and criticism to the dangerous adventure that it is.”

Setting Susan Sontag aside, it needs to be said that the principal text of importance — and to which it appears that Marraccini’s book owes its overarching metaphoric approach — is a philosophical work by the influential French philosopher Michel Serres. The entire concept for her book, its style of execution as well as its title, We the Parasites, is indebted to Michel Serres’ groundbreaking work, The Parasite (Le Parasite), published in 1980.

It is not merely that the title of her book is similar to his; the central, underlying philosophical concept of Marraccini’s book is based upon Serres’ work. It is therefore not credible to say, as Ruby does, that Marraccini’s work “represents a genuine breakthrough in our understanding of what criticism is and how it can be written.”

Especially unsettling, given the importance of Serres’ concept and its influence upon her, is that his work goes virtually unacknowledged by Marraccini. The first mention of him occurs more than halfway through her book, and only en passant: “I’m circling around Serres,” she says. She mentions him again several pages later, noting: “Parasite, a book I should have read, admittedly, well before starting to write this one.”⁴ Hard to say whether this is disingenuous or dishonest. Either way, she does not tell us what the outcome of “circling” around him yields. Instead, oddly, she goes on to report that she researched him and discovered he is a member of the Académie Française, which means, according to her, that he is entitled “to write anything you want or touch across the span of the humanities, to just be at play and have the world shrug and say ‘ah but he is an intellectual.’” In other words, she dismisses him.

And yet Le Parasite cannot be dismissed. It is considered a foundational work in posthumanism, ecology, ontology, politics, and communication theory. The explanatory metaphor for which Serres is renowned is the parasite, and in his book, he applies the metaphor to language, systems theory, politics, media, and literary criticism. He cannot simply be discarded as an “intellectual.” While not as well-known as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, or Jean Baudrillard, Serres was a professor at the Sorbonne for 27 years and a full professor at Stanford University, where he taught for nearly 30 years.

Serres defines the parasite as a concept embedded within a system. A parasite is “an operator, a relation . . . minimal to begin with, that can remain so until it disappears or that can grow until it transforms a physiological order into a new order.” He incorporates Greek myth, French parables, and poetry to make his points and writes in a beautiful, discontinuous, almost stream of conscious poetic prose that at times is difficult to parse:

To every major work is attached a descent into the underworld as an index that there really is a work. As soon as a Homer, a Virgil, a Plato, appears, their bodies cross the pale fields where souls drink blood. All of them are hosts. They eat and drink from their own writing, as do their contemporaries and their successors. Life needs work so much that, to survive, one must work oneself or look elsewhere. Once can accept being derivative. It is thus that the parasite condemns himself to death or at least to disappear if Ulysses does not come by.

Serres uses the parasite metaphor to explain how any system of signs or symbols functions and changes. In his metaphysics, parasites are agents of transformation and renewal. The disruption caused by the parasite gives birth to a new system that both includes it and rises above it. Which, as he points out, is exactly what a work of criticism does when it takes up — ingests or feeds upon — a text, a novel or poem or painting, and creates a new work from its base material. The philosopher or critic burrows into systems of thought or creative texts, creates new thought or criticism, and transforms the system from within. Criticism, creativity, and philosophy are parasitic acts.

Ruby claims Marraccini’s work “innovates formally and stylistically in multiple genres, rejects the significance of the distinction between primary and secondary text, and aims at the production of aesthetic experience and ethical self-fashioning rather than truth and knowledge.” This is precisely what Serres’ work does, and the techniques and style that Marraccini implements in her book make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that, in “circling” Serres, she leaned in and borrowed extensively from him. In fact, she opens her book with a metaphor — the fig wasp — based on his thinking about criticism to explain what she, as a critic, does: “I’m the wasp. I burrow into sweet, dark places of fecundity, into novels and painting and poems and architectures, and I make them my own.” Like the wasp, the critic is a generative presence, entering the work of art and, eventually, from this transformative relationship a new order — criticism — is produced. It should go without saying that finding an apt metaphor to instantiate a predecessor’s thinking does not constitute a “genuine breakthrough.”

Taking up We the Parasites as an object of study itself, in short order it becomes apparent that it is not a philosophical or “critical manifesto.” It is, rather, more of a mundane, personal, or lyrical implementation of Serres’ epistemological project. It is written in a mock-heroic voice that rages for reader recognition, often by sharing personal anecdotes. Early on in the book, Marraccini informs us that she suffered in college when she arrived there. She was, as she recounts, “angry” and she “sneers” at most people “from a safe superiority.” About her classmates she felt she “could no longer live with the unceasing happiness of my fellow students, who seemed so ignorant . . . .”

But it’s not just the jealousy and ressentiment towards the students who were happy that arouses her ire; it is also her professors, whom she holds in contempt. Or anyone who doesn’t see things her way: “I rage. I rage at the world and myself and the angry emeritus professor across the ocean who didn’t like my piece in a book review, and so assumed it was I, the little petulant girl, who must have some animus. Not I, the critic, the one who could eviscerate arguments or Myrmidons, not I who noticed his intellectual failure.” This type of subtweet admission would be unremarkable in a memoir, or on X, but we are theoretically talking about criticism that “conceives of itself as creative in method and outcome,” so the constant intrusion of her personality into the text, as though she were writing a piece for The Cut, detracts from the work at hand. For what is she trying to tell us with a statement such as “my fellow students . . . seemed so ignorant” except that she is smarter, better, more qualified to make pronouncements about art than they are? The hauteur expressed in this statement helps make comprehensible her sneering dismissal of Serres as an “intellectual.”

Marraccini’s approach toward the artists and texts she discusses apes that of Serres’, with the added peculiar twist that she often tries to identify with her subjects, queer them, or compete with them. In writing about Cy Twombly’s painting The Age of Alexander, she says, “I have three things in common with Alexander for whom I was most decidedly not named: I am short, I am stubborn, and my first love was Homer.” Later, still thinking about Alexander, she notes that he shaved his locks upon the death of his companion Hephaestion — as, she points out, did Achilles to mourn his dead companion Patroclus — which incites her to prove that she, too, can feel the kind of wrenching emotional trauma of historic characters. Envious, and desirous of proving it, she attempts to cut off all her hair but only manages to trim her bangs in the sink. She feels equal to Jean Genet as she reads The Thief’s Journal and says, “Look I can be bad, too, Genet, I think spitefully: My body is a disconsolate abattoir!”

At one point, thinking about the profession she professes to practice — literary criticism — she writes, in an attempt at self-deprecation: “I’m not even a good parasite because painters or novelists can see me seeing them, drawing off their vital fluid, forming new and odd things in my dark-lobed ovarians, and then shoving them out, hastily and fitfully, into the world of papers and reviews.”

This self-aggrandizing, solipsistic writing can sometimes be entertaining — her comments about cutting her hair and Genet are rather funny, in a sad sort of way — but more often than not it serves as a pretext for her to jam in enough classical references to Greek history and mythology to choke poor Bucephalus. Moreover, in every extended meditation on every subject there is the sense that she is missing something, forgetting something, overlooking a reference or some essential piece of evidence she needs to make the case that she is making art but is failing because she hasn’t read enough, seen enough, or knows enough — hence the logorrhea, the stringing together of haphazard facts and personal reflections that eddy slowly as they circle the drain of insignificance.

Ruby dedicates over 9,000 words to point out the failures of logic in Criticism & Truth in order to hold up the type of criticism Marraccini practices, pointing to her work as the direction toward which criticism should move if it is going to elevate the status of critics to that of artists. In characterizing Marraccini’s type of critical approach, he says “Whether it is called ‘personal criticism,’ ‘autocriticism,’ or ‘autotheory,’ the personal essay — narrative prose that employs a first-person pronoun which is assumed to be the author — has become an increasingly popular vehicle for performing readings of literary texts and other kinds of media.” And yes, the type of hyped-up, performative writing in We the Parasites is popular and in abundance everywhere today. There are countless critics chronicling their reactions to their reading and their engagements with works of art. Tens of thousands can be found on Goodreads, thousands more on Substack, and more on personal blogs. But this is not necessarily a good thing, for what we find in We the Parasites is a polyglot mix of random observations, sprinkled with MFA-level commentary on art, and pallid aphoristic impressions: quick takes, the kind Burgis warned against, shaped into what is nothing more than an extended lyrical essay⁵ masquerading as criticism.

Kramnick and Ruby share the same concern and anxiety about the diminishing institutional status of the humanities and the shifting role of the literary critic in academia and public-facing criticism. Ruby’s appeal to consider critics as artists reflects a desire to restore cultural prestige to critical writing and to distinguish it from both utilitarian reviewing and dispassionate scholarship in academic writing — a worthwhile endeavor. Kramnick tries to justify the epistemic value of criticism through a defense of its methodological distinctiveness and a belief that it can tell truths about the world.

Regardless of the validity of Kramnick’s aggressive claims about truth, close reading remains a technique that yields knowledge — something that cannot, unfortunately, be said for the type of practice promoted by Ruby’s aesthetically driven vision that largely eschews both truth and knowledge. I think for many of us, when we seek out criticism about a work of art, we likely have our own ideas about it, and what we are looking for from a critic is, as Chu notes: “not . . . another aesthetic experience; we are asking for a judgment.”

If nothing else, We the Parasites illustrates the risks of collapsing criticism into affective self-performance and rhetorical display, as well as obscuring the intellectual labor that has traditionally defined criticism as a knowledge-producing activity.

Whether literary criticism should strive for disciplinary rigor or embrace the freedom art offers may be an irresolvable issue — but it remains a vital one. The two paths that criticism can follow will likely continue to crisscross in a shifting, dialectical relation. But if we are to seriously entertain the idea of elevating critics to the status of artists, we must first ask: Does the pleasure of reading criticism — or admiration for its style — suffice to make it art? What standards apply to criticism once it is no longer tethered to scholarship, which, as Bury reminds us, “constitutes the researched ideal toward which, in a perfect world, all criticism would tend: thorough, rigorous, complete”? And is the elevation of criticism to an art form a meaningful transformation — or an exercise in self-branding?

Without clear criteria, the elevation of literary criticism to the status of art risks turning a discipline into a performance that privileges self-display over critical insight. The danger is not that it becomes too creative or too dangerous — but that it becomes too vague to matter.

GD Dess is an author, essayist, and literary critic. His work has appeared in LARB, The Millions, KGB LitMag, Serpent Club Press New Writing, The Metropolitan Review, Compact Magazine, and elsewhere. He publishes (ir)regularly on Substack at gdess.substack.com. Find him on Twitter @gdess.

1. Presumably after surveying the contemporary literary scene, he tweeted that “we are living in a golden age of popular criticism.” He provided a list of 21 essays that he pronounced as the best published in 2021, saying the list was “warmly received.” Unfortunately, the list is no longer available — at least I can’t find it — having vanished from Twitter along with Ruby’s account.

2. The distinction between criticism, academic criticism, and popular criticism collapses to near insignificance in its usage by almost everyone who has anything to say about the “crisis in criticism,” which will become clear in what follows.

3. Debates about close reading and its claims to truth are ongoing. Close reading has a long history and, despite Ruby’s and other’s criticism of the practice, it remains central to literary study. Interest in its methodological application appears to be growing; John Guillory just published On Close Reading, in which he notes, “The value of close reading as technique is more than great enough, in my view, to merit its continued support.” In October 2025, Princeton University Press will publish Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winan — a guide and a how-to, including a history of close reading and essays from Beci Carver, Jane Hu, Katie Kadue, and others on its many aspects. The introduction is particularly informative and instructive.

4. She then, for the first — and only — time, names his book and gets it wrong. She refers to it as Parasite when the title, in English and French, is The Parasite. Nor does she grant Serres the professional courtesy of writing out his full name even once.

5. I have previously written about the aesthetic sophistry and philosophical banality of the lyrical essay. See “The Perils and Pitfalls of the Lyrical Essay” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.