Some aspects of Literary Criticism

STRICTLY science, and any attempt to pigeonhole it into one category or the other would ignore either its conceptual side or its area f creative insights. In fact, this hybrid character has given literary criticism much of its nuance and subtlety by encouraging the fusion of the most minute and daring perceptions with established beliefs. But the pitfalls have been many, for criticism has enjoyed the prestige of both its ideological and creative status without accepting the responsibilities of either. In recognition of this dilemma, a distinction has been made between esthetics and literary criticism, but this distinction is a purely formal one, for criticism, even at its most creative moments, is built on a skeleton of ideas. And whatever values we may assign to its other qualities, criticism cannot escape its ideological responsibilities, unless, of course, one believes that ideas are themselves fortuitous eruptions of the mind. Moreover, being an intellectual discipline whose ambiguity lends itself to an evasion of rigorous scientific method, the ideation of criticism has been constantly shattered by waves of sensibility, and its norms recreated with little or no regard for critical principles that may have existed heretofore (except, of course, when it was to the interest of some critic to revive an older attitude or frame of reference) . However persuasively or cogently some critical viewpoint has been argued, it more often than not seems but the result of some shuffle of ideas, determined at bottom by the waywardness of taste and sensibility a process savoring of the method, if not the content, of impressionism. In this way criticism has contrived to ensconce itself in a position of immunity from the criteria of validity, for the vagaries of taste are ever placed beyond the checks of scientific thought

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