It sometimes seems that a perennial task of laborers in the vineyard of the liberal arts is to defend that labor, that vineyard, and those arts. That liberal education is under attack on various fronts is as indubitable as it is now tiresome, and in the media covering the state of higher education we see almost daily apologias, jeremiads, and polemics aimed at sounding the increasingly apocalyptic alarm. Literature students hear it a lot, of course, as they frequently deal with jokes or jibes, or sometimes earnest warnings, about the uselessness or impracticality of their field of study. Even within universities, we sometimes find ourselves on the defensive from those whom Terry Eagleton has referred to as “hardfaced philistines and crass purveyors of utility.” Under such circumstances, the idea of the critical genius seems utterly foreign or laughably nostalgic, and yet, the need for this sort of genius, here understood as a guide or spirit of inspiration, has perhaps never been greater.

As a scholar and critic working in the literary humanities, I do not think we need to adopt a defensive posture against such threats; nor do we need to argue for the usefulness of literature, at least not in any instrumental form. That all too easily plays into the enemies’ hands, inviting those who do not appreciate what the humanities are all about to use “metrics” and “data” to characterize our “outcomes” and demonstrate our “productivity.” This is, in more ways than one, quite literally beneath us as teachers, students, and lovers of literature. I want to speak of the vocation of the critic, which is the fundamental role of literary scholars, at least for the last hundred years or so. I am aware that we do much more in our language and literature departments today: rhetoric and composition, technical communication, creative writing, film and media studies, to name a few, and even within literary studies, activities include literary history, biography, and theory, along with analysis and evaluation. And yet criticism remains the cornerstone, and all students of literature are, in one way or another, guided by a spirit of critical genius.