An college, I passed through a phase during which literary criticism struck me as the most thrilling of all possible careers. Critics such as the late Northrop Frye, whose writings bristled with ideas about art, religion, philosophy, and history, seemed to epitomize intellectual achievement. Eventually, though, I had a crisis of faith. One of the messages of modern criticism is that all texts are "ironic"; they have multiple meanings, none of them definitive. Arguments over the meaning of Hamlet or Ulysses can never be resolved. But critics still keep arguing! To what end? For each critic to be more clever, more interesting, than his or her fellow critics? It all began to seem pointless.
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