Just came across the following as I was reading over some things I highlighted not long ago in Annie Dillard's The Writing Life:
"My work was too obscure, too symbolic, too intellectual. It was not available to people. Recently I had published a complex narrative essay about a moth's flying into a candle, which no one had understood but a Yale critic, and he had understood it exactly. I myself was trained as a critic. I was a critic writing for critics: was this what I had in mind?"
Thought this related quite well to some of the frustration I have sensed from my fellow literary criticism classmates. In studying literary theory do we risk being able to communicate only to those who, like us, have studied literary theory?
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