The Reading Experience

I have sometimes considered writing "personal" criticism--the sort of criticism that embeds discussion of a book or writer in subjective circumstances (the year of reading Whitman!) or connects the work to one's own "life experiences." However, I have always hesitated after reflecting on how little I usually admire such criticism when I do occasionally venture to read it: I really don't care what you were doing the morning you read "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," and if I wanted to learn about your college years I would seek out your own memoir and not the book you are otherwise supposed to be reviewing.

(Plus, whenever I have begun a review or critical essay with autobiographical reflections, I quickly rediscover how utterly tedious most of my life has been and that I thus have little to say about it. I can sometimes muster interesting things to say about a book I've read, but not about my life.)

Arguably the turn to personal or autobiographical criticism became more evident first in academic criticism, as part of the generalized revolt over the past 50 years or so against the academic practices of the previous 50 years (among them "objectivity" and "analysis"), almost all of them ultimately consigned to the dustbin of academic and literary history. (As eventually will be, of course, the practices that came to replace to them--although whether the notion of dispassionate analysis will ever make a comeback is probably more dubious.) The increasing frequency of personal reflection in more general-interest criticism is no doubt less purposeful, the result of some combination of the rise of "creative nonfiction," the domination of reviewing by novelists and poets themselves rather than professional critics, and, of course, the internet.

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