Wise Words

'Criticism' has never been an easy term to define. In everyday speech, it can be ambiguous between 'evaluative commentary' and 'evaluative commentary with negative force', and in journalistic and academic contexts it can mean writing reviews, on almost any subject, of any length from a few sentences to several thousand words, and of almost any level of erudition, or writing on artistic subjects academically. Further meanings arise in specific academic subjects. In English literature, where the ambiguities are most acute, 'criticism' can mean everything that academics do, an approach usually known as New Criticism, or just one of the activities that academics perform alongside history, theory, biography, essaying, creative writing, editing, and the rest of it. Even this might cause contention inasmuch as it supposes that criticism, as a specific activity of English academics, is distinct from the more erudite kinds of journalistic criticism.

This leaves a great deal unsaid about what this kind of criticism is. Progressing beyond this point is difficult, however, and not just for the familiar reason that defining a term which describes an activity will tend to exclude some of its practitioners or establish a gradient between those who perform the activity more and less purely, which can then be used for rating and ranking, with implications for people's status, professional or otherwise. There is also the problem of reconciling what many people understand by 'criticism' with what is currently expected of academics, especially by those who pay for what they do. To many, 'criticism' means evaluation, where the things being evaluated are not easily measured and where the criteria are not itemised beforehand. Some might add that the criteria tend not to be wholly concerned with the fitness of the thing being criticised for attaining certain predetermined ends, that critical judgements tend to be contestable, in the sense that competent users of the terms involved often disagree about their application in particular cases, and that critics tend to work on the assumption that their judgements can to some extent be justified. If criticism is like this, it may sit at odds with a conception of academics as people who create and disseminate knowledge and, more specifically, with how academic work is evaluated in peer review and audits like the Research Excellence Framework, which focus on its conformity to a set of technical standards. If this adumbration is right, then a question may arise about whether criticism is something academics can do in their professional capacity, while still being accountable to each other and those who fund them, or whether they must pursue it on the side.

The essays under review bear an interesting relation to this question because they exemplify criticism of the relevant, hard-to-pin-down kind and because their author, Stefan Collini, is singularly well informed about criticism. After early work on Matthew Arnold, whose writings about criticism played a role in the consolidation of English literature as a university subject in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Collini devoted much of his career to the intellectual life of twentieth-century Britain, writing studies in which criticism and its uncertain position between universities, newspapers, broadcasters, and other institutions were key. He shaped the thoughts of many on the subject by lecturing for the 'Function for Criticism' element of the Practical Criticism paper in Part I of the Cambridge English Tripos until it was discontinued in 2011, and gained distinction as a defender of the humanities in the wake of the Browne Review of 2010. This being so, it is difficult not to ask when reading this, the second volume of Collini's collected essays (the first was Common Reading, published by Oxford University Press in 2008), what, if any, conception of criticism is embodied in his practice.

One way into answering this question is to consider the effect of the publication of these essays as a collection. They are mostly reviews of biographies of literary or intellectual figures who were active in twentieth-century Britain–although some are reviews...