I have attempted to characterize some of the distinctive concepts and procedures of literary criticism and to defend the activity against a variety of misconceptions. I have suggested that some of these misconceptions are a result of the reluctance of literary critics to be articulate about the nature of their pursuit. Uncertainty about the justification for criticism has helped to enable the widespread circulation of structuralist and post-structuralist approaches to literature.

Jonathan Culler, in Structuralist Poetics, observes that ‘few of the many who write about literature have the desire or arguments to defend their activity… If the role criticism has been called upon to play in the educational system serves to explain the quantity of critical writings it does little to justify the activity itself.’ Culler aims to make out a case for criticism as ‘an independent mode of knowledge’, ‘a coherent discipline’ and to do so he turns to the model of linguistics.

According to Culler, criticism which focuses ‘on the text itself’, which ‘prizes this encounter and the resulting interpretations’ is ‘more difficult to defend’ than historical scholarship which was ‘once the dominant mode of criticism’.