Scott McLemee reviews Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies, in Inside Higher Ed:
In 1966, Roland Barthes published a short book—a pamphlet, really—called Criticism and Truth, in response to Raymond Picard, a distinguished professor and the biographer of the French classical playwright Racine, as well as the editor of Racine’s collected works. Barthes had published a structuralist analysis of Racine, and Picard’s response was titled New Criticism or New Imposture?—from which one may readily surmise the tone.
Barthes’s reply was polemical enough. He and his co-thinkers were self-consciously avant garde in both literary taste and theoretical commitments, and pulling the noses of establishment worthies was not a temptation easily resisted.
Barthes insinuated that Picard’s demand for “objectivity” and “evident truths” reduced scholarship to accumulate dust in libraries, while Barthes and company tried to formulate new questions and new ways of reading.
No code exists for judging the outcome of combat by pamphlet, alas, though it bears mention that Barthes’s remains in print in both French and English. Picard’s does not and is only remembered, just barely, for inspiring it. On the other hand, two or three generations of theory-bashing polemicists have recapitulated Picard’s grievances about academic criticism (e.g., jargon, trendiness, too much sex and psychoanalysis, etc.), without ever hearing of him.
Barthes goes unmentioned in Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press), although I suspect that the shared title and manifesto-like brevity of the newer book is more than coincidence. But the differences between them are more striking.
More here.