Thanks for the patience in this blog, I had surgery, then college. Since I keep editing the article I intended to post last week, here's an excerpt from an article as to why I dislike critical articles (this assignment itself was a critical article).
I was asked whether a critic or author has a more important opinion.
The opening of the paper was such:
In my humble opinion, the author's word is the word of god for the story. There is no one with a more intimate knowledge of a piece of fiction than the author. I do not trust anyone other than the author to offer an opinion on the story. Trusting people other than the original author leads to such things as Dracula: The Undead and Scarlett. Everything short of the author is always a secondary source. Because of this, it should never, I repeat, never be considered to have the same weight as the author's word. I listened to a lecture series by Eric Rabkin, a Ph.D. and expert on literature. His opinion on the fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel" was that it was about sex. His opinion on one of my favorite poems, "Annabel Lee", by my all time favorite author, Poe, was that it was about sex. His opinion on "Snow White", Frankenstein, and anything with plants in the story was that it was about sex. Keep in mind that Dr. Rabkin is a respected and knowedgeable professor who should be the expert on such matters.
What it seems to me is that often critics begin reading a story with a perspective in mind, leading to a result that they could have given you before they read the story. One example (I know that I am about to get sturck by lightning for saying this) is Chinua Achebe's description of Heart of Darkness. He begins with the thesis that Conrad (the author) is racist and thus has an entire lecture about how racist Conrad was (in "An Image of Africa"). However, I myself as well as others (Nic Panagopoulos from the University of Athens for one) hold that Conrad was not writing in a manner to demean Africans, but to decry the treatment of Africa by the Europeans (Conrad points out that the most compassionate people, and really the only ones who the protagonist feels any sympathy for are Africans, not Europeans). Unfortunately, after Achebe's famous lecture, most all of the critics who read that book claim it's racist.
What a critic should do is examine literature from his or her perspective, with an open mind, and then report on how someone might react to the piece from a more populist standpoint. In other words, Roger Ebert critiques movies based on whether an audience would enjoy them the same way Dr. J. Rufus Fears of the University of Oklahoma discusses Faust in terms of the moral philosophy therein. A good critic can pull out the general ideas of a piece and summarize them in a way that shows what someone observing the work might see, but also bring out the details that someone might overlook, although they may be significant.
