Word: critics
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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James Joyce has been at the same time one of the most influential and one of the least understood figures in our literary scene. Certainly the readers of "Ulysses" far outnumbered those who have any claim to understanding it, just as the parlor critics of "Finnegan's Wake" outnumber its readers. A critical work on this major enigma of our time is therefore particularly welcome, and especially when it comes from the pen of Harvard's most brilliant and penetrating critic...
...standards which most of us acknowledge, and to which, in general, we pay a good deal of attention. But there's another criterion which has become taken for granted to such an extent that it gets trampled under foot without our even noticing. And that is that the critic has no business addressing his little barbs or tossing his laurel wreaths toward an audience which functions on a different intellectual or social level than he does...
...this is not a prelude to an essay on the art of criticism. It's simply the best way I can think of to begin a series of digs against one particular species of critic--the movie critic. We're raising in our midst a generation of critics of a particularly American form of art who apparently have nothing better to do than to sit in picture shows and bore themselves stiff If the pictures they see are so god-awful that they're disgusted night after night in seeing them, then it isn't much of a compliment...
...other words, a critic who continually finds himself out of step with the audience he deals with is likely to be the fly in the ointment himself, though he generally won't admit it. If he's an esthete and can't stand cop-and-robber tights on the screen, then he has no business trying to tell an audience that craves blood whether or not a particular thriller is good or bad. He's batting in the wrong league, and the sooner he, recognizes this, the better...
...might be argued that if we get rid of the superior minds in criticism, then there is no chance for an improvement of the admittedly poor standards of the motion picture industry. But that isn't so. A critic who is so far above and apart from his audience that he doesn't think in the same terms isn't going to accomplish anything at all in improving the quality of what they're getting...