Readers who have, in the course of literature studies or even inadvertently in a conversation over too much coffee or red wine in a café, stumbled into the thorny question of “literary criticism – what is it good for?” may enjoy Tom Lutz’s lengthy and somewhat meandering essay on the subject on Salon.com. Lutz takes a … well … critical look at some recent guides for reading written by well-known writers such as Francise Prose, Harold Bloom, and John Sutherland:

Francine Prose, for instance. In her latest book, “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them,” Prose rails against the FemiMarxiDecons in English departments that are destroying literature and everything holy. Students, she writes, are now discouraged from loving novels and instead are “instructed to prosecute or defend … authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers’ origins, their racial, cultural, and class backgrounds.”

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I don’t want to stir up the dying embers of the theory wars or the culture wars, but why do Prose and Bloom open their guides with attacks against these mythical creatures? Bloom has them organizing into “covens” of gender and sexuality and multiculturalism. These boogeymen and boogeywomen and boogeytransgenderedpeople have destroyed reading, Bloom argues, by destroying irony, and “the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.” Itself sorely lacking in irony, this kind of talk sets up a dire narrative in which what Bloom calls “the restoration of reading” is needed, not just because literature is worth saving, but because civilization is at stake. This is a somewhat whorish old story, pressed into all kinds of service over the last century and more, not always to the most savory ends.

Lutz doesn’t offer any definitive answers to the debate, but it is good fodder for that next caffeine- or red-wine-fuelled conversation.