A Commonplace Book

It's the people who can't stand popular culture who are truly indiscriminate. Just say to your muttonchop friend, "If you can't tell the difference between Poison and the Cure, don't waste my time with your worthless denunciations of what you call 'rock 'n' roll.'"

It was not Stanley Fish, after all, but Northrop Frye who, in his 1957 book Anatomy of Criticism, derided evaluative criticism as so much "literary chit-chat." Such an approach may make "the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange," Frye said, but it has no place in properly professional literary criticism. (Included in his list of inappropriate modes of criticism, sure enough, are "all lists of the 'best' novels or poems or writers.") Barbara Herrnstein Smith's 1988 book, Contingencies of Value, actually tried to reintroduce evaluation as an explicit problem in literary studies, partly by arguing that evaluation is ubiquitous and inescapable. But that's not how most people have read her work; instead, people tend to say, "As Smith has shown, value is contingent, and that means we can't talk about it." In fact, she has argued that value is contingent and, therefore, we must talk about it. It's actually one of my Top 5 favorite things about Smith's book.

[T]he real fun of a list -- and the intellectual labor -- is realized only when its creator has to explain and defend its rationale. That's where the allure of lists really lies, because, for impassioned devisers of Top 5's, the nakedly evaluative function of the list is underwritten by a mode of popular-culture criticism that is considerably more complex -- and more exegetical -- than the form of the Top 5 seems to suggest....

[D]eveloping the faculty of discrimination is part of the fun of immersing oneself in the popular -- which means, interestingly, that few fans of popular culture are wholly "immersed" in it. To be a really knowledgeable fan, in other words, you usually have to be a keen critic. Remember this the next time you're accosted by some meerschaum-chomping, muttonchop-wearing columnist for The New Criterion or the National Review: It's the people who can't stand popular culture who are truly indiscriminate. Just say to your muttonchop friend, "If you can't tell the difference between Poison and the Cure, don't waste my time with your worthless denunciations of what you call 'rock 'n' roll.'"...

Academic modes of cultural criticism ... are rarely explicitly evaluative (and the exception of that famous outlier, Harold Bloom, only proves the rule). Though this aspect of academic criticism is usually ascribed to the pernicious relativism of postmodernism, it actually has a much more tangled and interesting history....

[O]ne of the most important functions that the culture industries perform is to produce criticism of the cultural artifacts produced by the culture industries.