“Thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio”

The ghost of the writer most likely to be designated the father of English literary criticism looms at the crossroads of critical and uncritical reading. He personifies a vision and names an age of eighteenth-century English letters. Resolutely embodied, staunchly eccentric, Samuel Johnson haunts his critics to this day. His dominion has recently come under siege: a recent MLA panel wondered “Whatever Happened to the Age of Johnson?,” while the concurrent offering at the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies more provocatively asked “Is There Room in Samuel Johnson for the New Eighteenth Century?” For an older guard of eighteenth-century scholars, the figure of Johnson evokes nostalgia for an earlier mode of professing literature before literary criticism became too professional. In his practical concern that literature enable us “better to enjoy life or better to endure it,” ¹ Johnson brought a collective audience to life in the newly imagined form of “the common reader.” This fictional figure, to whom Johnson so often deferred in crises of judgment, summons the author's image in a communal mirror, solitary yet befriended through the thriving medium of print. I am curious about how Johnson, even or especially in our postmodern moment, still haunts the profession of English letters not as a great writer, but as a “great man, writing.” ² However we as critics might try to demystify this vision of Johnson, to turn back to the printed page and away from the human image, his ghost still beckons.