Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb

Characteristic of the contemporary creative arts scene as it is deployed in universities is a false dichotomy between theory and practice. In the larger field of Literature, this is most obvious in the polarisation of Literary Studies from Creative Writing. As the title of my paper suggests, the tension between criticism and the arts, or theory and practice, is not new. It is indeed Northrop Frye who perpetuated the New Critics’ misconception in viewing the mode of existence of the literary work as wholly selfenclosed and inaccessible to language by saying: ‘Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb’ (Frye 1957, 4). This paper sets out from the hypothesis that such false dichotomy is predicated upon the tension between intellectual and emotional elements in our aesthetic response to texts. It postulates that writers are first and foremost readers and hence can learn from their reading processes. It offers a brief history of this tension between intellect and emotion through the course of literary criticism and suggests that some reading paradigms may be useful to writers if informed by psychoanalysis.