I am about to embark on a meta-essayistic exercise, where, as I write, I will exemplify the very topic that inspired this text. Yesterday, while browsing comments and opinions on a platform I will not name—though I intend to leave it in the near future—I came across a response to an article likely penned by a fellow professional from another digital literary outlet. Below, I quote the comment verbatim:
“Quan la crítica literària arriba a la literatura del jo, plego.”
This statement, written in Catalan, translates literally as:
“When literary criticism converges with self-writing, I quit.”
This perspective strikes me as catastrophist, dismissing a nuanced and profound matter: the position of an author who must balance the seemingly objective nature of criticism with a vital awareness of individual subjectivity. What the commenter perceives as an obstacle is, in fact, an artifice that enriches the process—one that, ironically, they believe should be concealed.
My initial reaction to this sentence was one of indignation. Yet, as I reflected, I realized I had expressed similar opinions in the past. So why did this comment strike me as so misguided? Partly, it was the definitive nature of the judgment, passed against someone in my field, with whom I instinctively empathize. But it was also because, almost immediately, I thought of a long list of authors who could be accused of this very “fault” yet are among the most influential figures in literature and criticism: Woolf, Baldwin, Sontag, Didion, Dillard, Smith, Solnit, Tolentino and Hilton, to name a few.
It is nearly impossible to identify a writer—even among journalists—whose critical work lacks a “literary touch.” The traditional myth of the detached critic—objective, formal, and upright—like the Moirai spinning destinies, persists. However, this ideal can coexist with the recognition that personal reflection enhances, rather than undermines, intellectual rigor.
Many view the blending of self-writing with literary criticism as a departure from objectivity. Yet, far from signaling a decline, this integration represents progress. Incorporating personal experience into critique—sometimes dismissed as the “self-writing”—infuses analysis with humanity and depth. Subjectivity, when wielded with skill, opens the door to a richer understanding of literature, its cultural resonance, and its connections to contemporary life.
Historically, literary criticism aimed for scientific objectivity. Movements like New Criticism, dominant in the mid-20th century, championed textual autonomy, insisting that meaning resided solely within the text. T.S. Eliot, in The Function of Criticism (1923), famously argued that “the emotion of art is impersonal,” advocating for a detached approach focused on form, structure, and language. This ethos aligned with the modernist aversion to the “biographical fallacy,” which held that an author’s life was irrelevant to their work’s interpretation.
However, by the mid-20th century, this paradigm began to fracture. Feminism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory challenged the exclusion of lived realities—such as gender, race, and class—from literary interpretation. Adrienne Rich’s When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision (1972) reclaimed personal experience as central to literature and criticism. For Rich, “re-vision” was an act of survival, defying the notion that objectivity was the sole path to truth. Similarly, Hélène Cixous championed écriture féminine, a writing style rooted in women’s experiences, as a vital tool for uncovering deeper truths.
Moreover, postcolonial critics like Edward Said and Toni Morrison extended this emphasis on the personal. In Playing in the Dark (1992), Morrison examined how systemic racism shaped American literature, using her perspective as a Black woman to expose cultural assumptions embedded in canonical texts.
I want to dive deeper into the essay and analyze in detail a known literary work that exemplifies how literary criticism can go hand in hand with self-writing. Although I would prefer to discuss a contemporary piece, which could seem more appealing due to its underlying sense of relevance, the importance of the matter compels me to turn to one of the foundational pillars. It seems to me that only its strength, already solidified through time and the evolution of criticism itself, allows me to do so.
A Room of One’s Own poses no challenge in terms of the density and complexity of the discourse Woolf develops: it is a brief essay, a thread of ideas masterfully presented through self-writing. Woolf, as a woman, writer, and thinker, places herself at the center of the action and guides us with her first-person narrative through the corridors of reason and judgment.
However, she achieves this through the presence of that self as a character, who visits the library, gathers books, and speaks as any ordinary individual might—though, of course, she is far from ordinary. She invents the story of Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, to illustrate how societal constraints prevented women from achieving literary greatness.
She also adds personal reflections, such as the account of being barred from a university library and denied access to academic resources, highlighting gender-based exclusions in intellectual spaces.
The debate over the convergence of literary criticism and self-writing often rests on a false dichotomy: either preserve “pure” objectivity, or succumb to subjective excess. This binary ignores that the best criticism—like the best art—requires both mastery of conventions and the courage to break them. As Igor Stravinsky wrote in Poetics of Music (1942), “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles” for mastery of structure enables the latter creative freedom.
This informed transgression has given rise to some of the most compelling works of contemporary criticism—those combining rigorous analysis with personal insight. When executed well, this fusion is neither self-indulgent nor chaotic but a discourse deeply connected to the human condition.
Returning to the comment that inspired this essay—”When literary criticism converges with self-writing, I quit”—I cannot judge whether the journalist in question achieved a meaningful fusion of criticism and personal experience. But the quality of the text depends not on the genre but on the author’s rigor and skill.
Of course, I fully understand the nuances of the reproach we have dissected. I understand the counterarguments the author might make to defend their point of view: that they were speaking strictly about literary criticism in the traditional or popular sense of the term and that, therefore, the entire section of other literary formats is exempt. That one should be able to rely on conventional means to form an impartial judgment on this or that (though here I would ask: does an impartial judgment truly exist?). Ultimately, the comment was intended as a defense of a specific genre, not to the detriment of other rich genres like self-writing.
And yet, the tone of the response remains so forceful (one can almost hear it reverberating in the recesses of one’s mind) that it is impossible to ignore its alarmist undertone. This person may continue reading their reviews without self-writing intruding into the carefully crafted world they have built. Still, if they were to look up, they might realize that the novelties which so surprise them are nothing more than old, familiar faces.