ABSTRACT
The new literary field that developed parallel with and in opposition to traditional, scholarly values and texts exerted great force on the shaping of France's collective sense of identity. The opening arguments of Chapelain's/the Academy's Sentiments illustrate clearly that like Scudery the Academy understands the quarrel to be over much more than Pierre Corneille's actual play. The forty male immortals begin by addressing the act of literary criticism itself, defending the practice in the interest of "utilite commune". In response to Valincour, Charnes composed a literary critique that valorizes the worldly reader as a judge of literary value. Charnes has recourse to worldly taste and the rhetoric of worldly literary criticism. Charnes's text is designed to offer a new way of reading and determining the value of a literary text. With the development of the novel and the influx of women onto the literary and social scene, came a new way of writing and especially a new approach to evaluation.
