> [Literary criticism] is a specialized field
> of analysis, with little real-world application beyond the analysis of
> texts, and rests mainly on the novelty of the insights of its
> practitioners.
Nonsense. TV, videogames, movies, posters, chatrooms, listservs, email are all texts of various kinds, and the job of literary criticism is to read all that stuff, figure out how it works, and sort the diamonds from the BS.
The only way to abolish literary criticism is to abolish reading.
> They haven't needed deconstructon to think critically.
Deconstruction is a tiny province of Planet Theory.
> noticed that the amazing insights offered by deconstruction, or "critical
> theory," seem to produce genuinely _awful_ writers,
Adorno, Sartre, and Fred Jameson are all luminous, beautiful writers.
> Why was their approach insufficient, until the advent
> of critical theory?
Because they lived in much simpler times, and we live in a high-tech world-system of 6 billion people.
-- DRR