We are logically driven by the title of this article to begin it with two initial questions concerning the concept of the critic on the one hand, and the concept of young writers on the other hand. Regarding the concept of the critic, I am initially reminded of a realistic and expressive story told by the American writer Struthers Burt. He says: “The year before the first war, when I was running some big ranches, I had working for me a sort of cowboy-ranch-hand named Al —an excellent, honest and hardworking young man, but one of the most singularly innocent young men I have ever known. I remember that one day I was in the ranch meathouse, which had a screen door, and that Al, who had been delegated to kill as many flies as he could on the outside, suddenly paused, pressed his nose against the screen, and looked at me with wide and innocent blue eyes. “Mr. Burt,” he drawled, “what makes flies? I was startled, taken aback. It was such a profound, direct, philosophical question that I had never thought of it before.”
I wonder, in light of this story, and in order to satisfy some of the young writers’ arrogance, along the lines of Al’s question: What makes a critic, a critic? This question takes us back to the basic principles of criticism: Is it innate or acquired? Is it science or art? Is it an impressionistic and artistic response to the creative text, or is it a systematic study of it that is committed to strict scientific laws and disciplined analytical mechanisms? These questions are still unresolved despite the reliable answers provided by linguistic approaches in this regard, and my hope is that this article will be able to raise many signs of skepticism about this positive linguistic answer.
The second concept mentioned in the title, “young writers”, also calls for some principal questions: Are young writers specialized in a literature genre that distinguishes them from the literature of older authors? Does judging the creativity of a text depend on the age of the literary author, or on the nature of the produced text and its aesthetic features? Aren’t Mahmoud Darwish’s poems when he was fifty and sixty years old more youthful, modern, and experimental than his traditional poems in his first anthology of poems; Awraq Al-Zaytun (Leaves of olives) which he published when he was twenty-two? Did Al-Aqqad not think that the English poet Thomas Hardy’s poems in his adulthood were livelier and more flowing than his poems in his youth? Did the Indian poet Tagore not regret publishing his first poetic works? Where he said: “There is no better way of ensuring repentance at maturity than to rush into print too early. But it has one redeeming feature: the irresistible impulse to see one’s writings in print exhausts itself during early life. Who are the readers, what do they say, what printers’ errors have remained uncorrected, these and the like worries run their course as infantile maladies and leave one leisure in later life to attend to one’s literary work in a healthier frame of mind.”
The text and its expressive techniques therefore are what determine the creativity, not the age of its owner. However, we cannot turn a blind eye to this common complaint in our cultural circles, which comes down to critics’ disengagement from young writers and their poor follow-up of the youth works. Perhaps the significant complaint is the poor outputs of the “scientific” results that critics reach when they criticize the literature produced by young writers. Despite the earnest effort these critics make when analyzing literary texts, their focus remains on applying the tools and mechanisms of the critical approach to the literary text, without much interest in breaking the creative code of this text in particular, or its author at the very least.
I recalled another remarkable story that expresses the state of young writers in the hands of contemporary critics, A Worn Path by the American writer Eudora Welty. The story follows an elderly woman named Phoenix who lives in the countryside. Leaning heavily on her cane, Phoenix makes the long journey from her rural home to the city. In the city, she seeks the doctor’s office to acquire, for free, medicine for her grandson, who accidentally took an alkaline powder intended for washing, thus it burned his throat and resulted in having unbearable pain. Therefore, out of constant compassion for her grandson, the elderly woman continues regularly and monotonously to cross this long road between the rural area and the city, until this road became worn out and turned into an exhausting path due to the severity of what this elderly woman’s heavy, slow feet had trampled upon. The story tells precise details about the surprises and obstacles that this elderly woman encounters in her frequent visits on this road. The story ends with the elderly woman still traveling on this road, having forgotten due to the accumulation of fatigue and passing of years: Why does she still travel on this road? Why does she take this medicine from the doctor? The reader finishes the last lines of the story uncertain about the fate of the grandson. It is unclear whether he was actually present in the house, or if he was still alive and recovering from the medicine that his compassionate grandmother keeps bringing home. The question now is: Does the situation of this elderly woman and her grandson resemble our contemporary criticism, which is packed with the theories and mechanisms drawn with the young written texts? Has contemporary criticism forgotten its true goal for using methods and analysis mechanisms to address the text by highlighting, analyzing and revealing the secrets of excellence and the causes of failure? Has contemporary criticism grown complacent with a shift away from the close reading of the creative text itself, prioritizing instead analysis through external frameworks and a focus on the formal categorization of themes and functions?
In the face of this critical paralysis, many young writers took the initiative to form online groups and forums on the internet to exchange their opinions on famous literary works, as well as on their own literary texts. In addition to relying on the reactions they received from other readers, many young writers turned to social media. There, they found satisfaction in the interaction and feedback provided by their followers. This interaction is characterized by compliments, emotional praise, and superficial readings. Some writers, possibly misled by the exaggerated publicity for their work, succumbed to the commercial pressures from publishing houses, to the point of endorsing the lies. This is a common disease among novice writers everywhere, the publicity director of one of the large publishing houses in America said, “The writer today lives in a world of increasing ballyhoo, and heaven help him if he lacks a sense of humor about himself.”
What we ask of young poets and writers can be outlined in one phrase quoted from the poet Robert Frost, which is “A momentary stay against confusion”. Moreover, the problem with famous literature nowadays is that it is completely integrated with confusion and chaos. Alongside what we are witnessing on social media of how arrogant some poor writers and poets are due to the considerable number of followers they have, and the fact that their literary production has stopped progressing at a low aesthetic level. This crisis was a result of a false sense of creative satisfaction, indicating the extent of young writers’ need for sober analytical criticism that is far from courtesy and favoritism.
This chaos among young writers is not limited to poetry, we are all familiar with the frantic rush towards writing “novels” by some of them. This wave, which carried a lot of turmoil, came specifically after the events of September 11, and especially after the landmark events of 2003 and the different social atmosphere that followed.
Nevertheless, this is not the only form of our young writers; in exchange for that turmoil a new literature has been formed by an elite of young people. The new names that have emerged after the millennium are numerous, including but not limited to Mohammed Abdalbari in analogical poetry, with his amazing universal language he is practically a poetic phenomenon, standalone of all his contemporaries. In the local poetic scene, important names stand out, such as Hatem Alzahrani, Haider Al-Abdullah, Asiya Al-Ammari, and Abdul Latif bin Youssef, while other names are more evident in their distinguished poetic formulation in writing prose poems, such as Hassan Al-Alma’i, Mohammed Al-Turki, and Ali Akour. In novels and short stories literature, the attention is drawn to Adi Alherbish, who published two short story collections that differ from the traditional ones, namely Hikayat Al-sabii Allathee Ra’aa Alnawm (The Story Of The Boy Who Saw Sleep) and Amthoula Al-Warda And Al-Natasi, whereas Khulaif Alghalib began his novelistic contribution by writing Euqdt Al-hddar novel, which promises a lot of creative excellence.
Traditional criticism, however, is unaware of this great change in the literary scene and the conditions of this new creative literary form. In the middle of all the noise that accompanies some shallow voices, there is a generation of young writers who now realize what they want, know what they are reading, and know what is the greatest goal of the literary expression that they seek to achieve in their writings. The transition of contemporary Arabic poetry in the last ten years towards Neo-Classicism and the reversion of analogical poem with different and non-repeated concepts – despite the neglect and disdain to which it was subjected over seventy years from critics of realism and modernity, – is nothing but an iceberg floating in the sea, i.e., focusing on surface elements without explicitly discussing underlying themes, which confirms the growing independence of poetic writing from prevailing critical visions. One of the good side effects of the major events that are sweeping through our region is that they have shaped a new and extremely specific self-awareness, which has been built up within this young generation of writers through three successive and accelerating stages that reflected an unprecedented overlap between the self (Ego) and the other, a tragic division of the self and its transformation into combatant selves. These three stages are the events of September 11, 2001, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the turbulent events in the countries of the region since 2011. In addition to the widespread and unprecedented openness to global literature, these landmark events made the writings of these writers more mature, far from loud slogans and broad intellectual banners and more capable of expressing the existential anxiety of contemporary human beings. It is hoped that this new, developing awareness will yield major creative results in various disciplines of literature.
The abovementioned was in regard to young writers, however, what about our critics? To answer this question in general, it is best to acknowledge, at the beginning, the noticeable disappearance of the literary critic’s voice in the creative ground and the decline of his position in shaping the aesthetic taste of literature’s producers and readers. Two key factors, which have a major impact on the decline of critical distinction between contemporary literary works, can be pointed out here.
The first factor is the neutrality of linguistic approaches –which monopolize the critical space– towards aesthetic values, and its extreme keenness not to issue value judgments on creative texts, and to be contented with the phenomenological description of the literary text, or the “cultural” use of it.
The second factor is the dominance of popular taste, which found its widest escape in social media. This popular taste – often far from precise aesthetic insight – has enhanced the self-motivation of many young writers and their sense of sufficiency as a result of this continuous praise from the immediate responses of their followers on social media.
Although some of these young writers may participate in the famous piece played these days regarding the decline of literary criticism, however, this desire for critics to return and perform their role towards literature is conditional for many of these writers – sometimes without their awareness–. They wish for the critic to be a “servant” of the literary text, and a promoter of the writer’s status and creative ability. That is, the critic should be reinforcing and confirming the texts that have already been written and not looking forward – as a critic is supposed to – to other possibilities that the writer can or should reach in the future. I have personally encountered this preconception about the supposed role of the critic among some young writers, I also noticed a degree of extreme sensitivity among a number of them when the critic presents a different vision than what they perceive about their literary texts.
As for the detailed answer to the previous question about the state of critics, it can be provided by dividing the current criticism state into four critical models. I would like to indicate that this division does not include educational guidance criticism and direct criticism, because, as we appreciate them and their role in bringing balance to the intellectual and social movement, they simply do not belong to the field of criticism and literature. The four models of critics are the functional critic, the connoisseur critic, the undirected critic, and the literary critic. All are detailed as follows:
- The Functional Critic:
This is the common model in the academic community concerned with applying critical approaches. Many of these critics are content with this “mechanical” role without bothering to comprehend the literary text, with a poor literary qualification, in terms of reading and expression. The writer Archibald MacLeish described a poet as “though they have mapped those mountains, have never climbed them themselves.!” The English poet Wystan Auden also said describing them, that “one of the worst symptoms of sterility in our present culture is that of “intellectuals without love” ! Don’t we now have the same problem, critics devoid of true love for the literary text?
The reasons for this sterility among this model of critics are multiple, one of them is what the critic Matthiessen pointed out, which is the nature of specialized research studies that makes its owner indifferent to anything outside the scope of his specialty, so if he does not have alert curiosity towards other fields, his mind will shut out. In fact, the decline of critical curiosity has reached the point where academic criticism has stopped at certain poetic and novelist names, without paying attention to the rising participants in the poetic and narrative fields and to the rich production presented by young writers. This decline may be due to the cautious and hesitant nature that characterizes the academic atmosphere towards new creative texts, it may also be due to its abandonment of the aesthetic values in the texts. For that reason, Ronan McDonald says “the key factor in separating academic from non-academic criticism, I argue, is the turn from evaluative and aesthetic concerns.”
Another reason is the critics’ constant pursuit of new critical theories or intellectual fashions, as Al-Aqqad puts it, without distinguishing between what is eternal in terms of ideas and theories and what is temporary. The most advanced role of a critic – as Matthiessen says – is to combine both the involvement in his age and the detachment from it in his criticism. In other words, to immerse himself in his age and to experience his own time to the full, hence he will have the ability to counterbalance this age with others, in order to discover the comprehensive literary values and standards. This distinction applies to critical approaches as well, making the attentive critic less passionate towards the popular approaches of his time, which soon decline and fade after a period of time to be replaced with other approaches and theories. In fact, the “See-saw phenomenon”, which is still moving in two opposite directions, is one of the most influential phenomena in the movement of human history and thought. It is due to a simple reason revealed by Hegel’s dialectic, which is the dominant phenomenon or idea carries the seeds of its internal contradictions within it, and the idea that contradicts it is considered as a fetus (unborn idea) still growing inside the phenomenon. The fetus –or the internal contradictions– is nourished by the phenomenon shortcomings and, at the same time, by the unaccounted enthusiasm of its owner and their extremism in implementing it. With the growth of this contradictory fetus and its subsequent birth, which will also carry within it its own contradictory fetus, the strange paradox is that this contradictory dialectic, ultimately, is for the benefit of everyone and for the good of humanity and the progress of thought and history. This is because it is capable of stopping any victorious movement from overreaching and extremist in the application of its concepts to the point of distorting them. For this reason, Jostein Gaarder said that “you might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents”.
This model of critics, which is characterized by a functional orientation in studying the literary text, has its most prominent manifestations. Most master’s and doctoral theses are clear examples of this model, as are the research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. These “scientific” research often combines critical stagnation and poor presentation and analysis, where the reader is shocked not only by the poor language and the weakness of the style, but also by the emptiness of ideas, the scarcity of deep research questions that nourish the thought besides this deficit in the literary text.
As for the result of reading the studies of these critics, it is the feeling of aloneness and the conceptual and creative gap between reading in general and what you read. The critic here is “unfamiliar” to both the text and the reader. This aesthetic and tasteful unfamiliarity reminds us of the funny news conveyed by Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, where An Arab stood at Al-Akhfash’s place, and heard what his people were saying about grammar and what goes with it. He was confused and amazed, and was silent in confusion speaking to himself. Then, Al-Akhfash asked him what do you hear, brother? He said I hear you speaking using our words, regarding our language, but your ideas are foreign to us. In addition, it is the same aesthetic unfamiliarity that Ali bin Issa Al-Wazir felt while reading the words of the rhetorician scholar, Qudama ibn Ja’far, about rhetoric. He noticed him codifying the rules of rhetoric in a non-eloquent manner! Ali bin Issa Al-Wazir says, regarding this confusing paradox, describing the effort of Qudama ibn Ja’far, I found him to have exaggerated and perfected it, and was unique in describing the art of rhetoric in the third place, in a way that no one can do it as him. However, I found the man’s speech to be a curious mix, lacking in refinement. His attempt to use rhetoric to describe rhetoric fell short, as if there was a disconnect between his knowledge and his words. His gestures seemed misplaced, failing to pinpoint his points As the Arabs say, “yadullu” (يَدلّ), meaning “to guide” or “to point the way,” but not ‘yudallu’ (يُدَل), which means “to be guided.”
For this reason, this model seems lost in front of the different text, subject to tribal standards and unable to comprehend poetry in anything other than the official text since academic criticism tends, by its nature, to scholastic classification in addressing literary works. It distributes writers and their works under pre-prepared facades, based on popular, general critical judgments in the critical field before comprehending the specific meaning of each individual text. Hence, the critic Ahmed Darwish noticed this strong similarity between academic critical studies in their tools, results and the nature of text addressing. Regardless of how diverse the texts studied are and how varied their aesthetic characteristics are; in these academic studies, you will find similarity and repetition as a common denominator between them all, since it focused on the means of the approach – which are certainly similar – and marginalized the goals of the study which are the texts – which are certainly different–. With similarity and repetition, the personality of the subsequent researcher is lost in taking from the previous researcher, just as the personality of the previous researcher is lost in his inability to balance between the means and the goals.
The factual criterion for any critic is how can he confront a literary text and discover its creative magic? Many can mumble using foreign terms, with the names of modern approaches and their concepts and the mechanisms of analysis within it, however, the real test for any critical process is how to confront the literary text, in the broadest sense of what a “text” means. In facing this test, the true critical ability of any critic will appear.
To conclude the discussion about this model I would say that the nuisance with this model is not its existence, as it has been constantly present throughout the literary ages, rather the danger surrounding the literary taste in this age is the increasing presence of this model and its sweep into the critical field.
- The Connoisseur Critic:
This model is significantly present in social media, where impressionism, subjective taste and sometimes courtesy prevail. The beginnings of this independent trend in critical reading began with the creation of blogs and literary forums on the internet fifteen years ago, such as: Muntadaa alsuakhir (The Satirist) and muntadaa jasad althaqafa (Body of Culture). With the decline of these forums, this independent, free critical and reading trend continued on the modern social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and reading groups on the internet.
People interested in literature on these platforms are not usually specialized critics, but rather expert readers, some of which are also writers and creative as well. What drives these people to criticism is the aesthetic motive driven by the aesthetics of the literary text, therefore, this type of critic rarely constructs their judgment about a text they do not like.
The most prominent features of this model are the absence of the distance between reading and what you read because the general position of this reading is not a neutral critical, but rather an adoption, justification, sometimes fascination, explanation, and complementation. The critic in this model is an “enthusiast” of the text, his reading is impressionistic and free from methodological limitations, and in many cases, it turns itself into a creative text that draw near and identifies with the criticized text. In addition, the impressionism of this critical position is deliberate and based on a view that is opposing and resistant to (indifferent) academic criticism. However, true criticism must always put a calculated distance between itself and the literary text, so as to not fall into the danger of interpretive or reverential identification with the text; because a critic’s disagreement with the text also makes it flourish. This means that in criticism we are in constant need of conditional approval, or restricted refusal: “yes, but”, or “no, but”.
- The Undirected Critic:
This model of critics emerged as a result of the collapse of central aesthetic theory and the growth of cultural studies that departed from studying aesthetic creativity and its mechanisms in literary texts, on the one hand. The tendency of these cultural studies towards marginalized aesthetic creativity appeared in three aspects. The first aspect is the interest in marginal literary texts that were neglected by aesthetic theory for being modest aesthetic literature, such as folk tales and narratives with an oral structure. The second aspect is focusing on the cultural values and avoiding preoccupation with the aesthetic and creative values in these texts, based on the idea that “literature was implicated in history”, as Ronan McDonald says, and is enmeshed in the social, political and economic systems that coincide with it. The third aspect of this turn is expanding the circle of critical attention; so that it is not limited to literary texts and arts, by paying attention to the embodiments of cultural meaning in texts and fields outside the literary field, or in the interstitial or hybrid area in which literature meets other fields. This has led to the flourishing of interstitial studies in the critical and cultural field. Thus, it becomes clear that the literary text, according to critics of this model, is not the only text that captures their attention, but rather it is part of a broad system of texts, with the broadest sense of the word text, which includes all forms of human cultural production, including sculpture, painting and photography. In addition to the manifestations of popular expression and even the activities of ordinary daily life. Therefore, the literary text in the studies of these cultural critics is just one individual within a family; the cultural processes that these studies are concerned with, with its persistence on excluding hierarchies between them, as Ronan McDonald puts it: “it drove a steamroller over hierarchies, flattening all into indifferent cultural practices.”
On the other hand, their interest in the literary text is not due to its literary characteristic, or as a high-class art of expression, but rather as a discourse that reveals, like other discourses and texts, the underlying cultural aspects and ideological hegemony of superior classes and races, thus the literary text has lost its distinction in terms of its aesthetic creativity from other texts. Rather – and more ironically – the creative characteristic of the literary text and its aesthetic value have become a cause for condemnation and rebuke. Owing to being, according to cultural studies, merely a deceptive aesthetic camouflage intended to hide the implicit pattern and evidence of the hideous hegemony of authoritarian discourse; it carries within it the shame of ideology. Accordingly, as Ronan says, just as cultural studies broke down boundaries between the two cultures, “high” and “popular”, between high-level and popular artforms that aim merely to entertain, it also dropped the distinction between culture as a creation and a creativity of any kind and the daily behavior of people in society. In other words, the appealing, creative meaning of culture has become part of the anthropological meaning. Writing a poem, going to the movies, or brushing our teeth are all part of the complex ways in which meaning is generated, they are also subject to the examination of cultural studies specialists who are adept at delineating the boundaries of the ever-present discourses that fuel social practice. “In the hands of cultural studies all artforms, high and low, become flattened into systems of cultural signs.”
Although most of the critics who belong to this model are also academic critics, they are distinguished from the functional critic model by two advantages. First, they are more attached to societal issues and general cultural phenomena. Second, their broad cultural knowledge, their liberty from the illusion of specialization, and their diverse reading in multiple, sometimes distant, fields of knowledge to reach intellectual and cultural visions with a holistic and comprehensive dimension.
In his introduction to the book Death of the Critic by Ronan McDonald, the writer and translator Fakhri Saleh presented an expressive representation of this model of critics – albeit did not specifically mean it –, because his speech was directed, generally, towards the entire academic literary criticism, as he noticed that this type of critics not only walked out of the scene, but rather he turned off the light of the hall after he walked out.
The best example of this undirected model of critics is Dr. Abdullah Al-Ghathami, after his tendency towards cultural criticism and his dramatic declaration of the death of the literary critic, as declared by the English critic Ronan McDonald. This declaration is an extension of previous death declarations starting with Nietzsche The Death of God, followed by Roland Barthes The Death of the Author, Michel Foucault The Death of Man, and Jacques Derrida Death of Speech. Albeit our awareness that this declaration from both critics, McDonald and Al-Ghathami, is a promotional and marketing declaration and not a real intellectual one. Simply because it contradicts the principle of the dialectical and circular sequence of ideas and the generation of its contradicted ideas from within, and the alternating exchange of positions that takes place between them, as summarized by Hegel’s dialectic that was previously mentioned. This relativity in meaning applies to another expression, the end, such as saying, for example, the end of the text era, or the end of history, according to Fukuyama’s expression, which he later denied. These are all promotional expressions and nothing more. This relative consideration of such evocative expressions is, possibly, what explains Ronan McDonald’s retreat from the basic thesis in his book itself, especially in its last pages, and his recognition of the importance of the role of the specialized critic, which is indispensable for the writings of ordinary readers. Although, he has set specific conditions for the specialized critic to return to practicing his avant-garde role in the critical field, the most important of which are creativity, avoiding guardianship and direct guidance.
This model also includes those in cultural studies who were influenced by the postcolonialism trend, which was represented by the foundational works of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, which resonated in the writings of some critics who turned towards cultural studies, as is clear in the works of Abdel Wahab El-Messiri in particular. The critic Dr. Saad Al-Bazai is interested in this aspect, as evident in his transcultural works, such as Estiqbal Al-Akhar: Algharb fi Alnaqd Al-Arabi Al-Hadith (Meeting with the Other: The West in Modern Arab Criticism), Almkwwn al-Yahūdī fī al-Ḥaḍārah al-Gharbīyah (The Jewish Component in Western Civilization), and al-Ikhtilāf al-Thaqāfī wa-Thaqāfat al-Ikhtilā (Cultural Difference and the Culture of Difference). Furthermore, his interest is also evident in his translations of Jerald Dirks’ and Zygmunt Bauman’s books. In addition to Dr. Khaled Al-Rashid and his interest in New Orientalism. In most of these studies, literary texts are present as cultural evidence of an intellectual phenomenon, which is often an unacceptable phenomenon, such as racial bias, ideological exclusion, or societal absence. The literary text is present in these contexts not in view of its literary or aesthetic creativity, but rather as mere evidence that confirms the spread of cultural diseases in the discourse of the ego, or the discourse of the other.
In brief, the literary text appears in the evidence of this trend as a non-literary text in a sense of civilization, of course, where the implicit discourse, and the defects of class, ethnic, or ideological bias hidden within the text are being explained. In spite of the attempts of some of this trend critics to combine – to some extent – between creative reading and cultural reading, such as Saad Al-Bazai, notwithstanding the temptation of the most popular and prominent cultural model that constantly pushes such specialists far from fulfilling aesthetic values.
- The Literary Critic:
The symbolic-oriented American poet, Wallace Stevens, wrote a poem that is closest to the Japanese haiku couplets. The title of this poem is in itself an expressive one Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird! This title expresses the true meaning of literary criticism, as it is a critical vision that continues to become richer every time the poem is read. It also represents this rare and precious model of critics, to which the title of the article almost applies The Death of the Critic, as the critic seeks in his reading of the text to achieve the difficult equation, which is providing a critical analysis characterized by objective balance towards the text, but at the same time compatible with it in the spirit of literature; in purpose and style of expression.
Following this logic, the critic acts as an ally to the text. Just as a genuine friend offers honest feedback to help you grow, a critic identifies weaknesses for improvement, rather than showering empty praise. This is why this model of critics does not believe in this methodological illusion promoted by modern linguistic approaches, which states that the real role of criticism is limited to describing the literary text without evaluating it and judging it. The spread of this illusion is what disclosed this linguistic and creative weakness in both the critic and what is being criticized, and led, along with other factors, to this uncreative chaos in the literary field. Up to the present time, where everyone who writes soulless rhymes or composes lines that do not have new ideas, thinks of himself as a great poet and an impeccable writer, deceived by the considerable number of uninformed followers on the one hand, and by the critics’ eagerness for his texts for the sake of their functional studies on the other hand. The major victim of this chaos is the genuine writer whose creativity is marginalized and excluded from the forefront and his distinctive texts are equated with other texts, describing them all as equal evidence indicating the linguistic function or cultural phenomenon studied.
Finally, I would say that despite the pessimistic title of Ronan McDonald’s book The Death of the Critic, the author opens at the end of his book a window of hope based on the fact that the death of the critic is a subjective choice of the academic critic himself, due to his withdrawal from cultural activities and his isolation in his academic shelter, in addition to his insistence on the delusional scientific methodology in criticism that makes him avoid artistic evaluation in his studies and research. However, if the academic critic wants to return to the arena and have a positive influence on it, he must eliminate these two illusions, the academic abstinence from following up on issues and literary texts raised on social media, and the illusion of methodological objectivity that is content with indifferent and neutral descriptions of texts, without evaluating them and balancing the aesthetic and creative aspects between them.
In this regard, Ronan McDonald said “Perhaps the critic is not dead, but simply sidelined and slumbering. The first step in reviving him or her is to bring the idea of artistic merit back to the heart of academic criticism. ‘Judgement’ is the first meaning of kritos. If criticism is to be valued, if it is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative.”
Adding to these two previous illusions, I would underline the necessity to eliminate a third one that is common among academic critics, which is building their critical knowledge through literature concerned with theorizing critical approaches with their intellectual and linguistic references. In fact, what builds true critical sensitivity in the critic is essentially the in-depth and continuous reading of literary and creative texts, with the use of critical theorizing books. I emphasize on the use, not immersing oneself in the critical theorizing books and becoming addicted to reading them. As is the case with many academic critics these days, which explains their widespread state of critical deficit when they interpret great texts as they fail to disclose their creative secrets that are not subject to their prior mechanical models, thus, they abandon the texts, not realizing the creative uniqueness they have missed of texts that encapsulate the rhythm of the world and the language of existence. As Said Bengrad said before, we are not talking about what the text can represent, i.e., we have no salvation outside the text. However, the outside in the interpretive conception does not refer to facts drawn from an unknown world, but rather it is symbolic consequences, whose source is the text itself, and is present in what resided in its first memory, which is: his language.
Your logical reference, then, as a literary critic, is the literary text, not the critical theorizing books because the literary texts are the transparent mirror that reveals to you the wisdom of existence, the secrets of the human soul, and the immortal values of art, including the value of being a critic of literature. When you deal with a literary text with warmth and love, listen to its rhythm, which is unique and different from other literary texts, you perceive it not just as a bare field on which you create your hollow theoretical structures borrowed from successive critical approaches, but rather you read it and wander in it, as if it is a garden. Strolling in this garden till you satisfy your lungs breathing its scent, and your eyes with its colors, you then start examining it, trying to reveal in your criticism the deepest artistic and human values contained in this literary piece. Possibly, you have looked at other eternal values that you think the text has been obsessed with or revolved around without identifying them clearly, which could have happened, it could have but for some reason, some astonishment, it did not happen.
Why did this happen in the text? Why did this not happen? This is the biggest question of criticism.
T1621
