Religion & Law

The Times Book Review today features several reflections on literary criticism.  The piece by Katie Roiphe -- author of a mordant item of criticism some time back on the...limpness of contemporary fiction by male writers -- makes the elegant point that the difference between good and bad criticism really has to do with style, not substance: "[C]ritics must strive to write stylishly, to concentrate on the excellent sentence . . . . More than ever, critical authority comes from the power of the critic's prose, the force and clarity of her language."  I've often felt that good scholarly criticism, in many ways like any good writing, is about the telling, not the story.  Novelty is hyped, craft overlooked. 

There is also an interesting piece by Adam Kirsch in the collection, with this observation about the decline in what he calls "the grand style" of criticism -- the criticism of Matthew Arnold:

I'm not sure anyone is writing this kind of criticism today -- certainly the most admired literary critics aren't -- and the reason is probably the one [Alfred] Kazin cited: "the growing assumption that literature cannot affect our future, that the future is in other hands." . . . . It is difficult to recapture the old sense, which Arnold had, that the literary critic is the critic par excellence, that the study of literature gives you the best vantage point from which to understand an entire society.

Perhaps this loss of centrality accounts for my own inclination to put the emphasis in the phrase "literary criticism" on the first word, not the second.  If you are primarily interested in writing, then you do not need a definite or immediate sense of your audience: you write for an ideal reader, for yourself, for God, or for a combination of the three.  If you want criticism to be a lever to move the world, on the other hand, you need to know exactly where you are standing -- that is, how many people are reading, and whether they are the right people.

I was left with a few questions.  First, if it is true that literary criticism no longer enjoys preeminence as a critical mode, what has replaced it?  Perhaps nothing has, and there are now simply a larger number of enclaves, each with their own critical predilections.  But one possibility for a replacement -- or at least an especially large and influential enclave (note, e.g., the expanding offerings of academic book publishers) -- is law.  Is academic legal criticism and writing (becoming) what literary criticism once was?

Second, I'm deeply sympathetic to the point that Kirsch makes in the second paragraph.  But I wonder whether the legal scholar must take the world-leverage view of criticism, or indeed of writing.  That is, I am curious whether the disposition that Kirsch describes is really confined to the likes of the Arnoldian literary critic.  A related question: must the Catholic legal academic take such a view -- to use one's writing life expressly to heave the world in a desirable direction, as an instrument of social improvement?  Or is it possible instead to write criticism in law while caring more -- or at least as much -- for the writing, or for oneself, or for God, as for its audience, its influence, and its relationship to and position within the world?