Literary criticism takes time. I don’t find the time itself difficult. Instead, I struggle with the best way to spend that time. Herman Rapaport’s The Literary Theory Toolkit gave me an answer.
In the book’s preface, Rapaport lists a literary critic’s necessary skills:
- Knowledge of an author’s life and times
- Competence in the author’s spoken/written language
- Familiarity with the disciplines adjacent to the author’s work (e.g., law or theology)
- Awareness of the author’s adherence to or flouting of literary conventions and genres and the author’s allusions to culture
- Identification of figurative language such as metaphor, metonymy, irony, or paradox and insight into how such language can structurally inform a writer’s work
- Detection of semantic and syntactic levels of meaning unnoticed by the typical reader
These tasks give me concrete ways to spend my time getting to know the literature I’m reading. They are literary criticism’s barriers to entry.
Experiments in Criticism 