ABSTRACT
When people read and respond to a poem, story, or play—whether by laughing or crying, by pondering its merit or throwing the book across the room— they are engaging in literary criticism. Literary criticism asks readers and authors to consider the various forms of literature and their necessary features, as well as positing why some works resonate over the centuries while others face a shorter shelf-life. It encourages readers to formulate interpretations generated by a text’s unique features, while also considering it in relation to a wider field. In contrast to derivative and mundane works, great literature inspires multiple interpretations, as Oscar Wilde proposes in “The Critic as Artist”:
the aesthetic critic rejects these obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation final.
(Complete Works 1031)