Weirdly hostile description: Lit Crit

For what it's worth, I only hear it called "lit crit" when it's in a derogatory or dismissive sense. People who are talking about it seriously or positively use "literary criticism".

edited 12th Aug '11 12:29:56 PM by Madrugada

Marxist criticism exists, obviously, but it's not the only approach to literary criticism at the moment, by any means.

I don't like this article. It's not an overview, it's a stereotype. Also kinda bothered by the implication at the end there that TV Tropes ignores or misuses established terms just because they're from literary criticism. I mean, maybe we do, but if so I'd rather we didn't.

Marxist critique may not be cutting-edge anymore, but it used to be very common and spanned many disciplines. (One of my favourite art historians is T. J. Clark, for example.)

(Ninja'd!)

edited 12th Aug '11 12:34:19 PM by Embryon

Actually, I'm really bugged by the sheer hostility towards the field that's, if anything, our closest cousin as far as academic disciplines go, maybe barring film and media studies. I mean, the same accusations of entrenched snobbery and such could easily be levelled at the visual arts world, or historians, or even the scientific community. Yeah, the academic world is full of snobs. Shock. Horror. But to paint such a uniformly negative picture is inaccurate and rude, and certainly not the kind of attitude I'm comfortable associating myself with, speaking as a troper.

My experience is that they lack the Tropes Are Tools mentality and treat "good/bad" as objective facts, dependent on specific criteria. We do not.

I hear "lit crit" from academics in the field a lot. Actually I'm not sure I've ever heard it used in a derogatory way before this.

Anyway, I agree with Bobby - literary criticism as a field is actually very, very close to what TV Tropes does, and a lot of the "why we hate lit crit" reasons are in fact demonstrably, objectively wrong. (I mean, we don't like it because it's all about attempting to define True Art? The idea that there's any objective standard for True Art has been out of vogue in the lit crit field since, what, the first half of the twentieth century?)

I've heard "lit crit" used neutrally, but I can't see why the article can't have the full term as title.

And yay, another case of using Straw Feminist to mean "radical feminist I disagree with".

edited 12th Aug '11 3:26:39 PM by DoktorvonEurotrash

Maybe if I'd ever run into a self described literary critic whose response to differing opinions was "huh, guess we look for different things in works" as opposed to "how dare you not like these works! <frothing rage>", I'd have a different opinion. As it is, I'll stick with that picture.

I've run into lots and lots who are the way you claim they never are — probably an overwhelming majority — but then A) I grew up in a University town, and B) I know a lot of people involved with genre fiction (especially speculative fiction). Maybe one or the other of those is the difference.

1) loads of literary critics and their work are nothing like the negative stereotype. 2) we're supposed to be neutral to our subjects, not gush or bash.

I'm going to go ahead and restore the cut version, since we hadn't decided. The edit reason was given as "HAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH OH FUCK MY SIDES ARE JUST SPLITTING."

edited 13th Aug '11 11:05:21 AM by helterskelter

^ Thank you.

I really like the restored version, which is a lot more balanced than I would've guessed from reading this thread.

You know what the problem is, I think? It characterizes Literary Critics, not Literary Criticism. The criticism is pretty similar to what TV Tropes does, so it makes little sense to be so caustic about it—but the entire thing is tainted by someone's opinion on the critics themselves.

That's my feeling as well - I too have some major issues with literary critics, but there's no need to bring that up in a page on literary criticism.

This is not a trope. It would, however, make a great Useful Notes page.

And speaking as someone with a postgraduate degree in English, I can say that this seems really unbalanced. My entire experience with literary criticism is that it consists of a set of lenses through which you can view a given work and evaluate it; one of the best textbooks I had as an undergrad took about ten different schools of literary theory and applied them, one by one, to a reading of The Great Gatsby. It was an extremely useful exercise in how different schools of criticism worked, what they were good at, and what they were bad at. People will argue about which lenses are best, and how best to use the lenses, but that doesn't make them any more pedantic than we are when we get into vicious arguments over what name we should give a trope.

The prevailing Straw Critic-esque depiction of literature academics in this write-up also seems hilariously at odds with my experience; most academics aren't interested in telling you what dreck the stuff you like to read is, they're interested in getting you to see why the stuff they work with is so interesting. They're OVER-enthusiasts. The depiction here seems a lot closer to a hostile newspaper critic than a professor.

Finally, for an article ostensibly about "literary theory," it never mentions important movements like New Criticism, Reader-Response Theory, or Structuralism (which is essentially the grandfather of Troping as we know it.) It's not useful for information, not particularly funny (to me, at least), and goes against the wiki's ethos in that it exists primarily to bash something instead of celebrating it. (The snark disclaimers do not excuse it from being a bad page.) I say cut it and let's put together a Useful Notes page.

edited 13th Aug '11 3:13:58 PM by Aldheim

Thanks for articulating that so well — I'd been thinking the page sounded like it was getting newspaper book critics mixed up with academic litcrit myself.

Why isn't this a Useful Notes page, anyway?

Minor necro, because I think this actually needs to be fixed. It's someone's (mostly false) opinion masquerading as a legitimate wiki page.

I don't actually think it's a particularly false description of many literary critics... but that's neither here nor there. My ideal solution would be to cut this thing altogether and create a normal Useful Notes page on Literary Criticism, listing the common schools and so forth. It's the sort of thing that Useful Notes seems good for, but that doesn't make much sense on the main wiki.

That's an excellent idea.

Nevermind. I cut it.

edited 16th Aug '11 8:13:14 PM by FastEddie

@30 Tropes, most of the ones categorized here at least, are typically more of a result than a tool anyway, so it's not like that's an incorrect view on things.