ABSTRACT
Looking back on this little book, I note how much of it has been devoted to the difficulties and mere practicalities of writing critical essays, and how little space has been found in which to evoke its pleasures. This may have been inevitable. Perhaps a similar unease is felt by those who have written short guides to other activities such as playing football, or appreciating opera, or being a social worker or making love. In these, as in literary criticism, many skills and satisfactions in fact derive more from instinct and a sensitively flexible response to each occasion’s localized demands than from intellectual rules which have been consciously learnt. So let me close by privileging pleasure through a rule against rules. If you repeatedly find that following any guideline-even one of those that I myself have suggested in the preceding pages-is actually diminishing your pleasure in writing critical essays, abandon it. Of course literary criticism can-and perhaps should-aspire to serve one or other of those high-minded causes that are often cited as its justification. But such a cause will best be served in works written with the vigour of enthusiasm by those who have learnt that composing a critical essay can be fun.
