Criticism and Style

What criticism is worth bothering with? It is criticism that brings to light testimony about how another human being has grappled with a significant part of the world in his or her own style. If the insight I glean from it manages to transcend the particularity of its source to become part of the resources I have for encountering the world, this testimony may be called a genuine form of knowledge, distinct from opinion or intuition. Yet it also maintains some of the texture with which it first appeared. The sort of knowledge I am interested in when reading criticism makes itself known not only through the words that appear on the page, but also through what has gone unsaid. The knowledge disclosed in criticism is above all a kind of self-knowledge, a knowledge of the self attained not through introspection, but through an encounter with something that both draws and exceeds the self. Criticism is a record of the change the self had to undergo to become receptive to the knowledge it is able to glean in the encounter with the object.