"Here, in conversation with the depressed classes of the academy, one sees how the Ph.D. system-more powerful today than it has been for decades, since so few other choices are open to young literary men-grinds and batters personality into a mold of cautious routine. And what one finds among these young people, for all their intelligence and devotion and eagerness, is often appalling: a remarkable desire to be "critics", not as an accompaniment to the writing of poetry or the changing of the world or the study of man and God, but just crtics-as if criticism were a subject, as if one could be a critic without having at least four nonliterary opinions, or as if criticism "in itself" could adequately engage an adult mind form more than a small part of its waking time"
Irving Howe, This Age of Conformity
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