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The Theory of Criticsm: From Plato to the Present: A Reader
This book is divided into five parts and covers: representation; subjectivity; form, structure and system; history and society; morality, class and ideology. Each part contains several thematic sections in which extracts from different writers and periods are juxtaposed. The study of literary theory has tended to concentrate on very recent developments. This volume, however, establishes both a sense of the continuities from Plato to the present day as well as the discontinuities. These are presented through comparisons and contrasts across the entire field of critical history.
577 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1990
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September 17, 2025
Raman Selden’s The Theory of Criticism: From Plato to the Present: A Reader presents itself as a kind of intellectual compendium, a reader that seeks to chart the genealogy of critical thought from its origins in Plato’s dialogues to the shifting discourses of modern literary theory. On paper, this is an ambitious and even necessary task. For anyone approaching the study of literature seriously, whether in Britain, Ireland, or the United States, a text that gathers the voices of centuries of critical reflection promises to provide a framework of continuity, a map of how ideas have moved, mutated, clashed, and persisted. And yet, despite its scope, I found this book to be disappointing, not because of the figures it includes — for the pantheon is predictable enough, from Plato and Aristotle through Longinus, Sidney, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot, Barthes, Derrida — but because of the way those figures are presented, reduced, and entombed within the static architecture of anthology. The problem is not that Selden’s selections are inaccurate, but that in curating these voices he has drained them of their urgency. This is a work that should have sparked an encounter with living ideas, yet too often it feels like paging through a mausoleum, where the voices of Plato or Nietzsche or Derrida are pinned like butterflies, exhibited rather than experienced.
Here Benjamin becomes the indispensable guide. Walter Benjamin, in his writing on quotation and on the fragment, warned repeatedly of the dangers of treating texts as inert, divorced from the constellation of history that gives them meaning. For Benjamin, a quotation was not simply a chunk of text ripped from its context, but a fragment that could be made to illuminate by being juxtaposed against other fragments, in what he famously called a constellation. The task of criticism, he suggested, was not to anthologise but to bring fragments into dialectical tension, to force them to spark. Anthologies, in their most uninspired form, do precisely the opposite: they line up voices one after the other, smoothed of their violence, rendered into respectable, sequential markers of a tradition. This is what Selden’s reader too often lapses into. Plato no longer accuses poets of corrupting the soul; he becomes the first entry in a parade. Aristotle does not wrestle with the nature of mimesis; he merely fills the second slot. By the time one reaches the theorists of the twentieth century, Barthes or Derrida, they feel less like radical critics of tradition and more like items on a checklist, their fire cooled into syllabus material.
I do not wish to deny the book’s usefulness. For a student preparing for exams, or someone seeking a reliable citation of a well-known critical text, this book is undeniably serviceable. Its organisation is logical, its editorial introductions competently contextualise, and its ambition to cover centuries of thought is laudable. But to return to Benjamin: a mere compilation of fragments does not yet amount to a constellation. The spark, the dialectical image, is missing. What makes the book useful also makes it lifeless. It is designed for consultation rather than for inspiration. It provides access but not experience. To use Benjamin’s terms, it presents criticism in the mode of historicism — as “what happened,” a smooth narrative of the past — rather than in the mode of historical materialism, where fragments collide with the present to reveal their urgency anew.
This failure matters because criticism itself is not an object but an activity. Plato and Aristotle were not writing criticism for anthologies but in response to the crises of their times — Plato in the wake of Athenian decline, Aristotle in the construction of systematic knowledge. Sidney’s Defence of Poesy emerges from anxieties about poetry’s role in Reformation England; Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy responds to the social upheavals of Victorian industrialisation; Barthes’ Death of the Author confronts the commodification of literature in mid-twentieth-century consumer society. Each of these texts was a weapon in a fight, not a relic. Selden’s reader too often presents them as relics. The social and political urgencies that shaped these works are softened, as if the point was to show “development” over time rather than confrontation. What results is a flattening, a sense that criticism has always simply been there, evolving serenely, rather than a reminder that it is always a matter of rupture, conflict, and intervention.
Benjamin’s critique of historicism is again apt here. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, he attacked the idea of history as a smooth chain of events, insisting instead that the past must be seized “as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again.” This is precisely what Selden’s anthology fails to do. It does not seize Plato or Nietzsche or Barthes as flashes of danger; it lays them out as if they were beads on a string. The result is that their radicality, their potential to interrupt, is dulled. To pick up this book is not to feel the urgency of Derrida’s deconstruction but to see him catalogued. The anthology mode, when handled without dialectical imagination, betrays criticism by embalming it.
One could argue that anthologies are inevitably like this, that they are tools rather than artworks, scaffolding rather than buildings. But this feels insufficient. For there are anthologies that do achieve constellation: collections that provoke rather than pacify, that deliberately juxtapose voices so that sparks fly. One thinks of Benjamin’s own Arcades Project, a massive montage of quotations designed to create an explosive image of nineteenth-century Paris. Or even of more modest anthologies, like Harold Bloom’s idiosyncratic The Best Poems of the English Language, which, whatever one thinks of Bloom’s canon, at least provokes argument by the very arbitrariness of its inclusions. Selden’s reader, by contrast, feels dutiful, almost bureaucratic. It does not provoke argument; it presents consensus. And consensus, in criticism, is the surest sign of lifelessness.
In fairness, it is possible to see Selden’s book as a product of its institutional context. In the late twentieth century, when literary theory was becoming an established part of university curricula, there was a need for textbooks, for readers, for materials that could be slotted into modules and courses. The Theory of Criticism fits that bill perfectly. It is accessible, comprehensive, structured. It allows instructors to assign Plato, Aristotle, Eliot, Derrida without forcing students to navigate complete works. In this sense, the book is useful. But here Adorno’s critique of the culture industry dovetails with Benjamin’s. For what is lost in this process is precisely what makes criticism criticism: the sting of thought, the negativity that resists assimilation. By transforming living texts into pedagogical modules, the anthology participates in the very process by which culture is administered, made safe, consumed without risk.
This, I think, explains why my response to the book was ultimately so lukewarm. It is not that the texts included are unimportant, nor that Selden’s introductions are incompetent. It is that the anthology mode itself, when handled without dialectical imagination, produces a deadening effect. It makes criticism into a history rather than a practice, into a subject to be studied rather than a force to be wielded. I found myself interested, yes, but never provoked, never unsettled. And a criticism that does not unsettle is barely criticism at all.
Benjamin’s remedy would have been to treat the fragments not as stepping-stones but as explosives — to bring Plato into confrontation with Barthes, Aristotle with Derrida, to allow Nietzsche’s aphorisms to collide with Eliot’s tradition, to show not continuity but tension. Instead, Selden’s reader smooths. The dialectic is neutralised. The fire is gone. Which is why, despite the importance of its subject, I could only rate this book two stars. It is interesting, but never alive.
In the end, what a reader like this teaches us is not only about criticism but about the risks of mediation itself. To anthologise is to curate, and to curate is to risk embalming. The challenge — which Benjamin understood, and which this book misses — is to find a way of presenting fragments such that they ignite rather than extinguish. Without that ignition, the history of criticism becomes not a resource but a museum. And in that museum, the voices of Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Barthes, and Derrida stand like statues: impressive, informative, but no longer dangerous.
Two stars, then, for a book that is serviceable but uninspired, useful but deadening. If one truly wishes to encounter criticism from Plato to the present, one must return to the texts themselves — to read Plato railing against poetry in context, to hear Aristotle defining catharsis with urgency, to watch Barthes declare the death of the author as an act of rebellion, not as a module entry. Selden’s book may provide the skeleton, but the flesh, the blood, the spark, are elsewhere. Benjamin’s reminder holds: history is not a chain but a constellation. To see criticism as history is to miss its fire. To see it as constellation is to feel its danger. Selden’s anthology gives us the chain, not the spark. That is why, for all its usefulness, it fails.
Here Benjamin becomes the indispensable guide. Walter Benjamin, in his writing on quotation and on the fragment, warned repeatedly of the dangers of treating texts as inert, divorced from the constellation of history that gives them meaning. For Benjamin, a quotation was not simply a chunk of text ripped from its context, but a fragment that could be made to illuminate by being juxtaposed against other fragments, in what he famously called a constellation. The task of criticism, he suggested, was not to anthologise but to bring fragments into dialectical tension, to force them to spark. Anthologies, in their most uninspired form, do precisely the opposite: they line up voices one after the other, smoothed of their violence, rendered into respectable, sequential markers of a tradition. This is what Selden’s reader too often lapses into. Plato no longer accuses poets of corrupting the soul; he becomes the first entry in a parade. Aristotle does not wrestle with the nature of mimesis; he merely fills the second slot. By the time one reaches the theorists of the twentieth century, Barthes or Derrida, they feel less like radical critics of tradition and more like items on a checklist, their fire cooled into syllabus material.
I do not wish to deny the book’s usefulness. For a student preparing for exams, or someone seeking a reliable citation of a well-known critical text, this book is undeniably serviceable. Its organisation is logical, its editorial introductions competently contextualise, and its ambition to cover centuries of thought is laudable. But to return to Benjamin: a mere compilation of fragments does not yet amount to a constellation. The spark, the dialectical image, is missing. What makes the book useful also makes it lifeless. It is designed for consultation rather than for inspiration. It provides access but not experience. To use Benjamin’s terms, it presents criticism in the mode of historicism — as “what happened,” a smooth narrative of the past — rather than in the mode of historical materialism, where fragments collide with the present to reveal their urgency anew.
This failure matters because criticism itself is not an object but an activity. Plato and Aristotle were not writing criticism for anthologies but in response to the crises of their times — Plato in the wake of Athenian decline, Aristotle in the construction of systematic knowledge. Sidney’s Defence of Poesy emerges from anxieties about poetry’s role in Reformation England; Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy responds to the social upheavals of Victorian industrialisation; Barthes’ Death of the Author confronts the commodification of literature in mid-twentieth-century consumer society. Each of these texts was a weapon in a fight, not a relic. Selden’s reader too often presents them as relics. The social and political urgencies that shaped these works are softened, as if the point was to show “development” over time rather than confrontation. What results is a flattening, a sense that criticism has always simply been there, evolving serenely, rather than a reminder that it is always a matter of rupture, conflict, and intervention.
Benjamin’s critique of historicism is again apt here. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, he attacked the idea of history as a smooth chain of events, insisting instead that the past must be seized “as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again.” This is precisely what Selden’s anthology fails to do. It does not seize Plato or Nietzsche or Barthes as flashes of danger; it lays them out as if they were beads on a string. The result is that their radicality, their potential to interrupt, is dulled. To pick up this book is not to feel the urgency of Derrida’s deconstruction but to see him catalogued. The anthology mode, when handled without dialectical imagination, betrays criticism by embalming it.
One could argue that anthologies are inevitably like this, that they are tools rather than artworks, scaffolding rather than buildings. But this feels insufficient. For there are anthologies that do achieve constellation: collections that provoke rather than pacify, that deliberately juxtapose voices so that sparks fly. One thinks of Benjamin’s own Arcades Project, a massive montage of quotations designed to create an explosive image of nineteenth-century Paris. Or even of more modest anthologies, like Harold Bloom’s idiosyncratic The Best Poems of the English Language, which, whatever one thinks of Bloom’s canon, at least provokes argument by the very arbitrariness of its inclusions. Selden’s reader, by contrast, feels dutiful, almost bureaucratic. It does not provoke argument; it presents consensus. And consensus, in criticism, is the surest sign of lifelessness.
In fairness, it is possible to see Selden’s book as a product of its institutional context. In the late twentieth century, when literary theory was becoming an established part of university curricula, there was a need for textbooks, for readers, for materials that could be slotted into modules and courses. The Theory of Criticism fits that bill perfectly. It is accessible, comprehensive, structured. It allows instructors to assign Plato, Aristotle, Eliot, Derrida without forcing students to navigate complete works. In this sense, the book is useful. But here Adorno’s critique of the culture industry dovetails with Benjamin’s. For what is lost in this process is precisely what makes criticism criticism: the sting of thought, the negativity that resists assimilation. By transforming living texts into pedagogical modules, the anthology participates in the very process by which culture is administered, made safe, consumed without risk.
This, I think, explains why my response to the book was ultimately so lukewarm. It is not that the texts included are unimportant, nor that Selden’s introductions are incompetent. It is that the anthology mode itself, when handled without dialectical imagination, produces a deadening effect. It makes criticism into a history rather than a practice, into a subject to be studied rather than a force to be wielded. I found myself interested, yes, but never provoked, never unsettled. And a criticism that does not unsettle is barely criticism at all.
Benjamin’s remedy would have been to treat the fragments not as stepping-stones but as explosives — to bring Plato into confrontation with Barthes, Aristotle with Derrida, to allow Nietzsche’s aphorisms to collide with Eliot’s tradition, to show not continuity but tension. Instead, Selden’s reader smooths. The dialectic is neutralised. The fire is gone. Which is why, despite the importance of its subject, I could only rate this book two stars. It is interesting, but never alive.
In the end, what a reader like this teaches us is not only about criticism but about the risks of mediation itself. To anthologise is to curate, and to curate is to risk embalming. The challenge — which Benjamin understood, and which this book misses — is to find a way of presenting fragments such that they ignite rather than extinguish. Without that ignition, the history of criticism becomes not a resource but a museum. And in that museum, the voices of Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Barthes, and Derrida stand like statues: impressive, informative, but no longer dangerous.
Two stars, then, for a book that is serviceable but uninspired, useful but deadening. If one truly wishes to encounter criticism from Plato to the present, one must return to the texts themselves — to read Plato railing against poetry in context, to hear Aristotle defining catharsis with urgency, to watch Barthes declare the death of the author as an act of rebellion, not as a module entry. Selden’s book may provide the skeleton, but the flesh, the blood, the spark, are elsewhere. Benjamin’s reminder holds: history is not a chain but a constellation. To see criticism as history is to miss its fire. To see it as constellation is to feel its danger. Selden’s anthology gives us the chain, not the spark. That is why, for all its usefulness, it fails.
October 15, 2007
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