Once upon a time, a high school sophomore was assigned to write a paper about the use of symbolism in The Great Gatsby. This sophomore was quite STEM-oriented, and she really questioned the premise of this assignment. Her understanding was that a 'symbol' was an image in the text that had some kind of meaning that wasn't directly obvious. But the question was: "Meaning to whom?"
1. As a provocation: for some of us, literary criticism *is* lay reading. It's the way we're inclined, perhaps a bit like some composers and music critics know theory back and forth and others compose and critique intuitively. I can certainly "just experience" a fantasy novel to some degree, but when I first read Lord of the Rings as a teenager, I was thinking about the themes of Lord of the Rings in a literary-critical way--the historical context, the theological underpinnings, the overall meaning of the West, etc. And I know people can have a knack for this because across widely different subdisciplines, methodologies, opinions, and inclinations of my professors, I got almost identical feedback for all of my English papers, and my peers, whether they were English majors or not, would often agree with literary-critical insights that were made in the classroom.
It's not any more or less valid than a lay experience of reading, just like a self-taught musician releasing indie EPs on bandcamp to a small devoted fanbase is, no less valid than a classical composer or a pop star, but it is its own thing.
2. I think it is hugely important, for literature's longevity, to have this conception of an ecosystem of readers serving different functions, so I am very happy you're writing your book, especially if the observations are as useful and interesting as the ones you have here. I don't think those observations lack for anything just because you aren't talking about the green light in a specifically "deep" or broadranging way.
3. It is a lot more popular in 2025 to denigrate literary criticism than lay reading. We all have to go through the high school literature meat grinder, but this is really not any sort of hot take, and I really don't think the way to "save" literature is to denigrate criticism as a practice. At least as many students, in my experience as a teacher, *come to* literature through criticism as are repelled by it, particularly now when criticism can be applied to other forms of media.
4. The "find-the-symbol" game ruined my formerly-STEMlord spouse for literature! I have a lot of sympathy for the teachers that teach it because it's a heuristic, but it sounds like it completely poisons the well if it doesn't work.
5. Most literary critics aren't opposed to lay reading at all. There's a whole field of literary criticism, postcritique, which is dedicated to, in essence, folding in a more 'raw' experience of reading. The reasons why this had to be explicitly laid out are complicated and have to do, in effect, with the way literature has been used philosophically. Literature is quite good for philosophy in a lot of ways since it gets at nuances plain philosophy and ethics can't always capture, but there is always the threat of lossiness. And even the critics that look at lay reading as a potential site of unconscious ideological transfer or what have you don't think you need to be a literary critic to reach whatever intellectual points they're trying to make if you caught them outside of scholar mode, you'd just get there in different ways.
There is more to discuss here if anyone wants a rundown of how literature became conflated with cultural criticism and the debate between cultural criticism and other forms of criticism, but suffice to say there are versions of your arguments being discussed in the discipline.
6. The undergirding notion of "truth" you are trying to espouse here is very much an *aesthetic*, a version of "truth" with a very specific valuation attached, and pinning down what such aethetics/valuations are, and why people hold them, is one thing that examining the world through literature is, I will assert, peerlessly good at. It's better than psychology or philosophy at it. Nothing can get closer to examining, processing, and debating our actual moral and valuative assumptions, the ones that inform every single action we take, than literature can, and literary criticism is the best lens for figuring out how. Criticism can be fuzzy about discussing it if you want it to sound like STEM, but frankly that's a feature, not a bug, and we all need to get very at home with uncertainty if we're going to be talking about such important-to-discuss, difficult things. We can get into this more if you want. I am quite happy to defend the way literary criticism talks about meaning and its real-world relevance.
It's not the *only* thing literature can do, but it is one thing.
7. Some time periods cannot be read lay-style. I'm incredibly pleased you're reading 19thc American literature, but I know I and the students I teach generally need help with my own time period, Romanticism. Once you get the hang of it (with help and context), many find it well worth the effort and incredibly relevant to our present day, but it needs lots of scaffolding.
I’m not convinced that there are areas of literature that can’t be gotten through lay reading!
I personally fell in love with Coleridge in high school mostly because he wasn’t assigned (but was referenced in fantasy novels I liked), and I felt no pressure to discover interpretations along the lines of: “The Great Gatsby is a heartbreaking and influential novel about an innocent green light that is harassed incessantly by its rapacious New York neighbors.”
Just because most people who encounter certain kinds of literature do so through the discipline of English, doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do it.
I find a lot of other people really struggle with Romanticism, and one of my most rewarding moments as a teacher has been watching something click for a student through literary-critical framing--the historical stakes, a deeper understanding of the psychological/philosophical questioning that's going on, the formal qualities.
I know that even after years of reading him, I wouldn't have the appreciation of Wordsworth that I do without Geoffrey Hartman, who clued me in to just how sad, ambiguous, and complex he can be. The vast majority of people who casually read him (not "lay readers," necessarily, just people who haven't initiated themselves through one method or another) just think he's a "nature poet," whatever that is.
It isn't "sneering" in the slightest to acknowledge that there is a difference between casually reading "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and deeply engaging with "The Prelude" and the entirety of "Literary Ballads" in such a manner that you understand more about Wordsworth's moves and preoccupations.
I'm a casual reader of many authors, and I recognize that there may simply be a difference between my reading of them and people who might be going deeper. It's not my lack, it's just that I haven't devoted the time yet. My wording was meant to 1) be inclusive of people who approach Wordsworth in different ways (through criticism, through "lay" reading, or what have you) and 2) simply and factually differentiate people who haven't done the deep dive and those who have. Not every writer is as tough to crack as Wordsworth or needs the deep dive, but trust me, he can be very tough (as those of us who have tried and failed to grasp "The Excursion" know well!).
There are fields I actively *don't* do a deep dive for, also! I read literature from the Harlem Renaissance very casually, in part to just maintain that feeling of fresh insights that casual reading can provide in contrast to my much more intensive work on Romanticism.
It is in no way a valuative statement; I'm just happy if anyone reads Wordsworth and gets something out of him. I am 100% for "lay" reading. I am exceedingly happy that substack is opening a door for readers of all types to share their insights with each other, and I've learned quite a bit from thinkers who are not critics. I am also just 100% against these charges against literary criticism, because they are flat wrong, not only in their evaluations, but on the factual level; the way methods like "close reading" are actually, typically used in arguments and in the classroom does not resemble what is described in this essay or in other critiques on this platform. It honestly feels as though many people were made to feel dumb in the literature classroom and are taking it out on criticism-- which is incredibly unfortunate for everyone involved. As I said, my ultimate goal is a thriving ecosystem of readers.
And here, you're being much more elitist, tyrannical, and prescriptive about your reading style than I would ever dare to be, despite devoting my life to this artform in all of its splendid multivariance.
There are several examples that more or less totally contradict what you're saying. Here's three of them:
1) Plenty of people "emptied their mind" when they read Nabokov's Lolita and came to the extremely facile conclusion that it was pro-pedophilia. This is not trivial: people used it to prop up pedophilic values. However, a keen reading of the book--not an "empty" one, a sharp, perceptive one, the reader Nabokov is courting, and not just the sharp "lay" reader but the reader that might just understand what the book is saying about the Aesthetic Movement it is partially inspired by--reveals it to be an absolute evisceration of a pitiful man.
2) Me. Myself. Reading Hartman on Wordsworth and realizing his potential for extraordinary melancholy and sadness, and then re-reading Tintern Abbey and seeing a level of depth I had not (for all of my deep, deep, rapturous love of the poem) seen before.
3) People who are just interested in more historical takes on literature! They exist! They just want to read Tolstoy or what have you in relation to what was happening at the time, and although this isn't my preferred mode of reading and not one I'm particularly good at, they often come to fascinating conclusions by making those connections! If you don't like that, I don't know what to tell you. You're missing out.
Sorry, but we've just reached an impasse: I have room in my imagination for your style of reading, and you clearly don't have room in it for mine. And I'm not interested in grand-unified-theory dogmatism.
Love it. Not just because I had a similar realization a similar way with the same book. My high school English teacher gave us a handout with "all the symbols," so we could find them in the book. I reread it over the summer on my own, and enjoyed it much more.
This post also helped me articulate why I drifted toward philosophy instead of literary criticism as a college English student. Literary criticism felt, very much like you describe, like pulling the Truth out of the text and arguing about it. Philosophy, when it used texts, was more often using the text as a tool to explore interesting ideas. I ended up lay reading books and reading philosophy more seriously -- rarely ever reading literacy criticism.
That was my experience as well. It's easy to project opinions on to the text, cherry pick passages in support, then launder it as "critical reading." The Ern Malley hoax comes to mind.
In his 1931 book of criticism, Axel's Castle, Edmund Wilson defines modernist literature as "symbolism." As this took off in prose, it was also seizing the art world. Symbolism is real, though sometimes unconscious on the part of the creator (and just as often very intentional). The full appreciation of art is a skill, like astronomy or navigating at sea. It's more than what you see at first. It takes practice and that work can feel phony, until it's understood, like the drills athletes perform while learning a sport.
Upon checking it seems that this isn’t an accurate description of what Wilson does, rather tracing Symbolist influence forward into some of the key modernist writers.
I think it is accurate in Axel's Castle, as he was really tracing symbolism out of naturalism -- was made Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et all different from then19th century naturalist writers. Nobody was calling it modernist literature back then, but it really came out in the early 20th century, pre-1930. I think it is fair to say, as Roger Shattuck does, that for Wilson, symbolism in literature = modernism.
This is confusing, since Symbolism the movement is pre-modernist and certainly far before the 1930’s, and many modernists were quite dedicated to eradicating from their works any opportunity for conscious or subconscious interpretation of this kind (though many were not!)
As a former high school English teacher, there's much here that I agree with, as well as some points I take issue with. I wholeheartedly agree that the literary analysis paper isn't the best way for students to practice writing and argumentation. To me, this is not because it encourages artifice or the writing of lies, but because it is very difficult to get better at writing and argumentation if there's no real conviction in one's argument. I don't know that students are LYING when they write about the symbolism in The Great Gatsby, but I don't believe many of them feel a strong conviction either way. I think it would be much better for everyone (better for the students learning and, frankly, better for the teachers reading all those papers) if students wrote more often about topics that mattered to them. But I don't this this means there's no value in teaching close reading. First, it's a fallacy to suggest that close reading is only about symbolism and mining a text for some deeper, less accessible "real" meaning. Close reading also involves noticing tone, recognizing patterns, and considering the specific diction an author uses to craft their story. These are all useful in discerning meaning in a text, whether one is a lay reader or practicing a sort of professional literary criticism. But most importantly from my personal experience in the classroom, close reading can also lead to the most interesting conversations. Rather than asking students to land on a "correct" analysis (which I don't believe many teachers do), close reading can be an invitation for them to propose their own theories and interpretations of a novel and allow for true discussion in which those interpretations are tested, investigated, and expanded in community.
Literary criticism helps to understand literary work, fiction, or poetry tremendously. I am always grateful to our brilliant literary theoretics, as we call them, like M. Bakhtin, Y. Tynianov, or V. Shklovsky. Dostoevsky's Stepanchikovo Village in the Tynianov's critic became evident that it is a parody of the Gogol's Chosen Passages from Correspondence with his Friends. He opened for us, readers, both writers. But it's more for the specialists. Lay reading is an individualistic love of literature; it's an immersion into a book, one after another, when your life becomes a book. There are two different categories: professional and passion.
I really like this essay. I teach creative writing to college undergrads (I do not have an academic English lit background), and one of the things I am always encouraging them to talk about is their experience of difficulty. I don't want them to regurgitate the points I've made about the texts we read, and I don't even want them to put on their official "analysis" hats. I want them to convey to me as plainly as possible what their real lived experience of making their way through the text was like, even/especially if that experience was punctuated with periods of boredom or confusion. Because if you're not able to observe your own reading experience, honestly, how are you going to shape the experience of your own readers?
“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in,” says Hemingway. “That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.” He opens two bottles of beer and continues: “I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.”
Great discussion and I have couple of thoughts. Most school papers, not just English ones, incorporate a performative element, imho. They are not necessary dishonest, but they push that edge. You can make a good argument for something you don't fully believe. Sometimes you end up believing it also or discover something new. The idea of a correct reading or truth is itself suspect, don't you think? And authors absolutely write things they are not fully aware of. I know I do and I love hearing what readers find in my work that I didn't see. The unconscious is the ultimate creative source. What good criticism does is amplify a personal reading, just like a book group does. Different people find different things there.
I am mostly assuredly a lay reader, and a lay writer about what I read. And thus your essay speaks much to me. I would agree with some of the commenters that that doesn't have to mean that "literary criticism" is useless. (Some of it is, but then so is some of everything.)
Lay reading, though, doesn't mean just reading a book once. You can read a book in a "lay" fashion, and reread it -- multiple times -- in a similar fashion and you will still be understanding more about the book (if it has any depth to it), learning more, enjoying it in different ways. And lay reading can involve something like close reading, or at least very careful, slower, reading.
I really loved your article. I didn't mind the old symbol system of the university although it was just about as useless as you have described. But with the post moderns, it became an undertaking that didn't seem to have much to do with literature. My professors were some of the worst snobs- they called the type of reading most people do "naive reading." I am very old and so have gone through most of the critical fads of English departments. I am very excited about your book. I am sure it will be a wonderful read and important corrective to reading for the meaning "found" by educators.
Glad your story got so generous. Symbols are summits that represent the struggle to resolve the moil of eternal ambiguity. This is January, the month Janus can stop joyously, furiously, restlessly, resentful, secretly and darkly, with gratitude and humble sadness, looking at himself face to face, and with slightly, but proudly, sentimentaliy regard the past with gentle fondness and remorse, and the future with blind excruciating hope and even craven cunning, the wobbling dagger of a deadly, self-gratifying design. Blake wrote, ALL THINGS POSSIBLE TO BE BELIEVED ARE AN IMAGE OF THE TRUTH, either bitterly gnashing his aching teeth, sneering, or exalting in ambiguity's ambrosial moil.
The last comment for this essay was from Jan. 23rd. And it's mid-March. So for me to say something now is, on its face, interrupting the flow of a bunch of other much more *engaged* and currently informed interlocutors who've moved on. Ostensibly, you, the essay's author, has moved on. I want to risk a reply just in case somebody's not quite said it the way I'm thinking it, and that opens up something new for someone. Maybe (as I believe you'd agree) the task of articulating my different understanding (or argument---fine, same thing) will force me to acknowledge closer adherence to your arguments.
---First, I immediately reacted against your validating a 'layreader''s interpretive authority because I hadn't really thought it through. You're absolutely right in a number of contexts. No, I hated friggin school-lit until about my senior year of high school. I had an enormously talented senior-year English teacher. I was coming out of a long fascination, verging on morbid obsession, with fantasy and (I'd say now) a symbolist strain of early-20th-century literature. I'd 'grown-up' enough to become a lover of (I believed) high-minded horror fiction. At 17, 'big fan of Peter Straub, bigger fan of Steven King. And senior lit's requirement to read _Crime and Punishment_ over the summer was sadism. My inflexible principle was I'd really pay attention to the lit when it was as intriguing as a Steven King novel. The senior English teacher assigned us Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and some other O'Connor shorts, concluding with _Wise Blood_. I felt like I recognized those violent, insane people (I was in Lower Alabama in a Catholic high school). In this context, I was a powerfully engaged lay-reader.
---But I didn't get one of the basic O'Connor dynamics, that conscious profanity could be a sort of unconscious desperate, suicidal plea for something 'true', something that was enough-redemptive that it wasn't the shit we settle for. This enormously insightful, patient teacher taught me the move. I wrote my last, longest 'research essay' for that class on Capote's _Other Voices, Other Rooms_. To my mind, if you understood Steven King, you'd see how it links up with Southern Gothic.
---The next year, I was floundering, trying to find what I'd major in (Canadian universities had a tighter selection schedule). I had a superlative professor for modern fiction. He assigned "Wise Blood." I was ready to jump on it. He asked, WTF? I said, "It's speaking to the Grandmother's---the reader's struggle---to see that we're all involved in a sacramental mystery experienced in everyone's life. But we have to be able to look past the limited materialistic rationales that our modern world reinforces. We have to be able to see that mortal horror and disgust are the ways into un-worldly redemption." (I was a very good Catholic schoolboy.)
---He didn't miss a beat. He said, "That's a possible reading. Maybe that's what the author intended. But if you read it like somebody who's reading it for the first time and isn't catechized with mystical RC sacramentalism, then, to the extent that O'Connor sets up parallels to Gospel stories of the Holy Family, her version is plainly the ugliest, most viciously satirical debunking you could imagine. Take it literally, and it's a desecration of orthodox theology." Of course, he was right. He taught me the 'practice' of close-reading (which, as the conservative Southern New critics had articulated it, he really didn't buy. He was atheist, Communist, and for '86 a radical 'Feminist'). I caught onto Deconstructionist methods because it worked the same ways with every text. (He advised against.) After a year, I was convinced that it wasn't necessary to read the novel or the poem---'Just go read the criticism and critique it. That profound stupidity didn't last very long. Finishing my B.A., starting an M.A. at McGill, I wasn't so damn tightly wound to Decon, but I was (so far as I thought) Mr. Critical Theory. The Mentor confessed he'd realized finally he was dumbfounded by the erudition he found in the old 150-70-year-old traditionalist criticism he'd begun paying more attention to because those old-fogey theory-ignorant scholars had been forced to become so intimately familiar with the texts and the contexts of the works they specialized in. That made no sense to me.
---A year later, I was thrown off my Deconstructionist horse and saw I'd never trust it really again. Aesthetics and politics and history and religion and philosophy and economics and race and class and gender were what literary works were about. (And that was reductive.) But you see how after that sort of literary education, I could utterly understand layman's reading as excellent, so long as the layman could understand the words *and the contexts* of the works [she] read. If you've never been taught the basic comedy/tragedy models, why wouldn't you laugh maliciously observing the flawed protagonist thwarted and humiliated? If you're strongly empathetic, why wouldn't you act at a Jacobean play like the ignerrint Scots Highlanders and leap onto the stage with your broadswords to protect Hamlet in Act V? Context is a big deal. If you don't know American racism at a basic level, Huck Finn is every bit the moronic reprobate he's been taught he is. Take race and politics to another level, and perhaps Jim is a grown, experienced, perfectly capable agent who has chosen of necessity to manipulate Huck's emotions in order to facilitate the ruse that he's the boy's inherited slave and so reach the Free States. Taken from that framework, it's not unlikely.
---Think about how easily and intimately Gen Alphars process the double-logic of dank memes and intuitively understand the practical logic of portraying cinema villains. "If he wears a mask, even if we know he's basically decent, he's dehumanized and set-up to be a casualty, usually with 'reason' (within the film's context)." You can say that nobody has to explicitly teach Alphars how the rules of contemporary visual communication work: rules can be inferred from multiple examples. You could also assert that nobody has to explain to the six-year-old brother who sanctimoniously warns his nine-year-old sister, "Mom and Dad don't want you jumping on the bed. And I'll tell." that the nine-year-old sister's acid retort, "DUHHHH-H-H-H . . .!!!" signifies defiant sarcasm. But I'll bet that the little boy's got to get that response in context many times before he twigs. And I'll bet the much-cleverer sister just triumphantly spells it out for him multiple times before he gets it (and begins to exult laying "DUHHHs" on his baby-friends). Common sense became pivotal to liberal tradition as a way of arguing that natural philosophy and natural laws were self-evident. But they always required lots of 'reinforcing' instruction to correct.
---So why should I have gotten wound up and aggravated by the initial mention of authoritative lay-reading? It's poetry. As has been said, if you're going to start out with the violin or the flute, no serious teacher begins by saying, "A musical piece you play on the instrument by yourself is a sonata. We just listened to a sonata. Why don't you just see if you can play your own kind of sonata now that you've been shown how you hold the bow/where you position your lips?" As James Fenton points out in _The Strength of Poetry_, when we ask schoolkids who are able to read and write at age-appropriate learning-levels, "That was a fun poem, right? Why don't you try to write your own poem!" we don't go through elaborate explanations of process and craft. We don't even attempt the level of complex, scaffolded instruction we use for the sublime 5-paragraph essay. We just say, "Why don't you attempt to write a poem?" And then the kids who 'know something' and the kids fortunate enough give the product that wins a particular poetry-teacher's praise realize they're writing poetry. The other kids get told (as you've pointed out), "Maybe if you contemplated more deeply the kind of poem you're really trying to express---your rage against your parents' arbitrary rules, those intriguing but awful abuse experiences . . . 'Don't forget that you make the lines seem sorta meaningful by themselves, even if they continue to the next line. And you shouldn't 'rhyme' things, especially at the end of lines, because that makes it sound like bad Hallmark Card poetry and Boomer rock and community musical theater . . . But repeat words and phrases at different points because that sounds emphatic and demonstrates you're paying attention to how you're intentionally 'crafting' your poem!"
---But it still seems to me that what's evident and persuasive about the ideal of authoritative layman's reading is just what's central to New-Critical close-reading and Decon: If the text reads that way, you can't make its most plausible denotation vanish by wishing. Sure, there are ways of claiming rony, sarcasm, elisions, prevarications, formal distortions, decorum, awareness of prospective censorship and persecution---all these context-warranted, extra-textual interpretive frames could be working, and it's always a critic's prerogative to make claims about what's <un->written in the blank margins. But you can't deny what the text actually expresses according to the most basic contextual understanding of why it's printed just the way it is. You can be 'meta' and say, "The rhetorical question "What's the difference?" here is an oblique way of saying, "Duhhh. There's no difference." But the most basic Deconstructionist move---which was once the first rule of close-reading---is to concede, "The text is demanding we consider what the difference really is."
A brief thought in case someone scrolls through these comments looking for ideas about literary criticism, literary theory, and close reading. They aren't really represented in this story. The central example, of the green light in Gatsby, is an example of the problem of non-intentional criticism: If something wasn't intended, then it's misleading and illegitimate. There have been two principal answers to this objection: first, much of the history of art is known to us through non-intentional readings. We only know some of what Leonardo intended with the Mona Lisa. The intentions of nineteenth-century authors, composers, and artists were sometimes wildly at odds with the reasons their work is valued. (Berlioz was an atheist; Vuillard was an anarchist; Bulwer-Lytton was a classicist.) Second, intentionality itself is elusive. If you're a writer or an artist, you experience this whenever you make art. You may start out with an intention, but then writing intervenes, characters come alive, and your own revisions blur and skew your previous thoughts.
Literary criticism, theory, and close reading can be fascinating and enormously enriching, and in modernism, they are often part of the writing project itself. Ignoring them for the reasons set out in this essay can have the unfortunate effect of cutting you off from large parts of the conversation about contemporary culture and art.
Is the English assignment really teaching you to lie, or is it teaching you to read and perceive through practice? By forcing you through the paces of crafting an argument about a book, does the assignment not make you think about how the literary devices and techniques of the book serve its meaning (whatever that may mean)?
Some teacher or other once said to me "clear writing proceeds from clear thinking, and if you can't articulate your idea it means your thinking is incomplete." I don't think that's entirely true, but certainly crafting a persuasive argument requires a level of engagement and thought that's not required absent the assignment. The hope, I think, is not that you will learn to lie well but that by imitating the processes of analysis you will learn its merits.
I'm skeptical of the distinction between "critical reading" and "lay reading" and suspect it's largely a polemical device designed to elevate the status of folks on one side or the other of the establishment. It seems to me that reading is an enterprise to which each reader brings a set of tools and experiences - sometimes few, sometimes many. There is no distinction between critical and lay reading, just a spectrum of techniques and experiences a reader may bring to a work.
There's no right or wrong approach to reading, though some approaches are well or ill suited to particular works. Sometimes certain critical techniques or tools are essentially necessary to a meaningful understanding and enjoyment of a work, great or pedestrian, and sometimes not. Sometimes critical tools enhance a reader's appreciation for a work or help them derive meaning from it. And sometimes critical tools are counterindicated - they can actively get in the way of enjoying a piece of perfectly good genre fiction, for instance.
This seems to me just an extension of things that are obvious, like, to understand and enjoy a work in English you must be able to understand English. Different tools are required to appreciate different works. What speaks to you may speak to me, or not. Reading is an exercise of taste, and one's tastes are developed by practice and thought.
Perhaps the idea is that "critical reading" means reading with an eye toward doing criticism, especially with the purpose of crafting arguments about the aesthetic value of a work relative to other works. But criticism, I would argue, is a different enterprise entirely from reading, and I'm skeptical that one reads for criticism in a way that is qualitatively different than regular-ass reading. Composing criticism may entail the deployment of a more, well, scholarly set of analytical tools, and the enterprise of criticism may mean devoting a lot more time and attention to using those tools, but at root I think what my English professors do with a book is basically the same as what I do with it, which is basically the same as what an untrained reader does with what they read.
So a few thoughts.
1. As a provocation: for some of us, literary criticism *is* lay reading. It's the way we're inclined, perhaps a bit like some composers and music critics know theory back and forth and others compose and critique intuitively. I can certainly "just experience" a fantasy novel to some degree, but when I first read Lord of the Rings as a teenager, I was thinking about the themes of Lord of the Rings in a literary-critical way--the historical context, the theological underpinnings, the overall meaning of the West, etc. And I know people can have a knack for this because across widely different subdisciplines, methodologies, opinions, and inclinations of my professors, I got almost identical feedback for all of my English papers, and my peers, whether they were English majors or not, would often agree with literary-critical insights that were made in the classroom.
It's not any more or less valid than a lay experience of reading, just like a self-taught musician releasing indie EPs on bandcamp to a small devoted fanbase is, no less valid than a classical composer or a pop star, but it is its own thing.
2. I think it is hugely important, for literature's longevity, to have this conception of an ecosystem of readers serving different functions, so I am very happy you're writing your book, especially if the observations are as useful and interesting as the ones you have here. I don't think those observations lack for anything just because you aren't talking about the green light in a specifically "deep" or broadranging way.
3. It is a lot more popular in 2025 to denigrate literary criticism than lay reading. We all have to go through the high school literature meat grinder, but this is really not any sort of hot take, and I really don't think the way to "save" literature is to denigrate criticism as a practice. At least as many students, in my experience as a teacher, *come to* literature through criticism as are repelled by it, particularly now when criticism can be applied to other forms of media.
4. The "find-the-symbol" game ruined my formerly-STEMlord spouse for literature! I have a lot of sympathy for the teachers that teach it because it's a heuristic, but it sounds like it completely poisons the well if it doesn't work.
5. Most literary critics aren't opposed to lay reading at all. There's a whole field of literary criticism, postcritique, which is dedicated to, in essence, folding in a more 'raw' experience of reading. The reasons why this had to be explicitly laid out are complicated and have to do, in effect, with the way literature has been used philosophically. Literature is quite good for philosophy in a lot of ways since it gets at nuances plain philosophy and ethics can't always capture, but there is always the threat of lossiness. And even the critics that look at lay reading as a potential site of unconscious ideological transfer or what have you don't think you need to be a literary critic to reach whatever intellectual points they're trying to make if you caught them outside of scholar mode, you'd just get there in different ways.
There is more to discuss here if anyone wants a rundown of how literature became conflated with cultural criticism and the debate between cultural criticism and other forms of criticism, but suffice to say there are versions of your arguments being discussed in the discipline.
6. The undergirding notion of "truth" you are trying to espouse here is very much an *aesthetic*, a version of "truth" with a very specific valuation attached, and pinning down what such aethetics/valuations are, and why people hold them, is one thing that examining the world through literature is, I will assert, peerlessly good at. It's better than psychology or philosophy at it. Nothing can get closer to examining, processing, and debating our actual moral and valuative assumptions, the ones that inform every single action we take, than literature can, and literary criticism is the best lens for figuring out how. Criticism can be fuzzy about discussing it if you want it to sound like STEM, but frankly that's a feature, not a bug, and we all need to get very at home with uncertainty if we're going to be talking about such important-to-discuss, difficult things. We can get into this more if you want. I am quite happy to defend the way literary criticism talks about meaning and its real-world relevance.
It's not the *only* thing literature can do, but it is one thing.
7. Some time periods cannot be read lay-style. I'm incredibly pleased you're reading 19thc American literature, but I know I and the students I teach generally need help with my own time period, Romanticism. Once you get the hang of it (with help and context), many find it well worth the effort and incredibly relevant to our present day, but it needs lots of scaffolding.
I’m not convinced that there are areas of literature that can’t be gotten through lay reading!
I personally fell in love with Coleridge in high school mostly because he wasn’t assigned (but was referenced in fantasy novels I liked), and I felt no pressure to discover interpretations along the lines of: “The Great Gatsby is a heartbreaking and influential novel about an innocent green light that is harassed incessantly by its rapacious New York neighbors.”
Just because most people who encounter certain kinds of literature do so through the discipline of English, doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do it.
That's lovely.
I find a lot of other people really struggle with Romanticism, and one of my most rewarding moments as a teacher has been watching something click for a student through literary-critical framing--the historical stakes, a deeper understanding of the psychological/philosophical questioning that's going on, the formal qualities.
I know that even after years of reading him, I wouldn't have the appreciation of Wordsworth that I do without Geoffrey Hartman, who clued me in to just how sad, ambiguous, and complex he can be. The vast majority of people who casually read him (not "lay readers," necessarily, just people who haven't initiated themselves through one method or another) just think he's a "nature poet," whatever that is.
It isn't "sneering" in the slightest to acknowledge that there is a difference between casually reading "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and deeply engaging with "The Prelude" and the entirety of "Literary Ballads" in such a manner that you understand more about Wordsworth's moves and preoccupations.
I'm a casual reader of many authors, and I recognize that there may simply be a difference between my reading of them and people who might be going deeper. It's not my lack, it's just that I haven't devoted the time yet. My wording was meant to 1) be inclusive of people who approach Wordsworth in different ways (through criticism, through "lay" reading, or what have you) and 2) simply and factually differentiate people who haven't done the deep dive and those who have. Not every writer is as tough to crack as Wordsworth or needs the deep dive, but trust me, he can be very tough (as those of us who have tried and failed to grasp "The Excursion" know well!).
There are fields I actively *don't* do a deep dive for, also! I read literature from the Harlem Renaissance very casually, in part to just maintain that feeling of fresh insights that casual reading can provide in contrast to my much more intensive work on Romanticism.
It is in no way a valuative statement; I'm just happy if anyone reads Wordsworth and gets something out of him. I am 100% for "lay" reading. I am exceedingly happy that substack is opening a door for readers of all types to share their insights with each other, and I've learned quite a bit from thinkers who are not critics. I am also just 100% against these charges against literary criticism, because they are flat wrong, not only in their evaluations, but on the factual level; the way methods like "close reading" are actually, typically used in arguments and in the classroom does not resemble what is described in this essay or in other critiques on this platform. It honestly feels as though many people were made to feel dumb in the literature classroom and are taking it out on criticism-- which is incredibly unfortunate for everyone involved. As I said, my ultimate goal is a thriving ecosystem of readers.
And here, you're being much more elitist, tyrannical, and prescriptive about your reading style than I would ever dare to be, despite devoting my life to this artform in all of its splendid multivariance.
There are several examples that more or less totally contradict what you're saying. Here's three of them:
1) Plenty of people "emptied their mind" when they read Nabokov's Lolita and came to the extremely facile conclusion that it was pro-pedophilia. This is not trivial: people used it to prop up pedophilic values. However, a keen reading of the book--not an "empty" one, a sharp, perceptive one, the reader Nabokov is courting, and not just the sharp "lay" reader but the reader that might just understand what the book is saying about the Aesthetic Movement it is partially inspired by--reveals it to be an absolute evisceration of a pitiful man.
2) Me. Myself. Reading Hartman on Wordsworth and realizing his potential for extraordinary melancholy and sadness, and then re-reading Tintern Abbey and seeing a level of depth I had not (for all of my deep, deep, rapturous love of the poem) seen before.
3) People who are just interested in more historical takes on literature! They exist! They just want to read Tolstoy or what have you in relation to what was happening at the time, and although this isn't my preferred mode of reading and not one I'm particularly good at, they often come to fascinating conclusions by making those connections! If you don't like that, I don't know what to tell you. You're missing out.
Sorry, but we've just reached an impasse: I have room in my imagination for your style of reading, and you clearly don't have room in it for mine. And I'm not interested in grand-unified-theory dogmatism.
Was Greg Bear's THE INFINITY CONCERTO one of those novels?
Love it. Not just because I had a similar realization a similar way with the same book. My high school English teacher gave us a handout with "all the symbols," so we could find them in the book. I reread it over the summer on my own, and enjoyed it much more.
This post also helped me articulate why I drifted toward philosophy instead of literary criticism as a college English student. Literary criticism felt, very much like you describe, like pulling the Truth out of the text and arguing about it. Philosophy, when it used texts, was more often using the text as a tool to explore interesting ideas. I ended up lay reading books and reading philosophy more seriously -- rarely ever reading literacy criticism.
That was my experience as well. It's easy to project opinions on to the text, cherry pick passages in support, then launder it as "critical reading." The Ern Malley hoax comes to mind.
In his 1931 book of criticism, Axel's Castle, Edmund Wilson defines modernist literature as "symbolism." As this took off in prose, it was also seizing the art world. Symbolism is real, though sometimes unconscious on the part of the creator (and just as often very intentional). The full appreciation of art is a skill, like astronomy or navigating at sea. It's more than what you see at first. It takes practice and that work can feel phony, until it's understood, like the drills athletes perform while learning a sport.
Upon checking it seems that this isn’t an accurate description of what Wilson does, rather tracing Symbolist influence forward into some of the key modernist writers.
I think it is accurate in Axel's Castle, as he was really tracing symbolism out of naturalism -- was made Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et all different from then19th century naturalist writers. Nobody was calling it modernist literature back then, but it really came out in the early 20th century, pre-1930. I think it is fair to say, as Roger Shattuck does, that for Wilson, symbolism in literature = modernism.
This is confusing, since Symbolism the movement is pre-modernist and certainly far before the 1930’s, and many modernists were quite dedicated to eradicating from their works any opportunity for conscious or subconscious interpretation of this kind (though many were not!)
Terrific post. This physicist son of a high school English teacher read every word. By the way. The Adorno quote at the end. He’s not wrong.
As a former high school English teacher, there's much here that I agree with, as well as some points I take issue with. I wholeheartedly agree that the literary analysis paper isn't the best way for students to practice writing and argumentation. To me, this is not because it encourages artifice or the writing of lies, but because it is very difficult to get better at writing and argumentation if there's no real conviction in one's argument. I don't know that students are LYING when they write about the symbolism in The Great Gatsby, but I don't believe many of them feel a strong conviction either way. I think it would be much better for everyone (better for the students learning and, frankly, better for the teachers reading all those papers) if students wrote more often about topics that mattered to them. But I don't this this means there's no value in teaching close reading. First, it's a fallacy to suggest that close reading is only about symbolism and mining a text for some deeper, less accessible "real" meaning. Close reading also involves noticing tone, recognizing patterns, and considering the specific diction an author uses to craft their story. These are all useful in discerning meaning in a text, whether one is a lay reader or practicing a sort of professional literary criticism. But most importantly from my personal experience in the classroom, close reading can also lead to the most interesting conversations. Rather than asking students to land on a "correct" analysis (which I don't believe many teachers do), close reading can be an invitation for them to propose their own theories and interpretations of a novel and allow for true discussion in which those interpretations are tested, investigated, and expanded in community.
Literary criticism helps to understand literary work, fiction, or poetry tremendously. I am always grateful to our brilliant literary theoretics, as we call them, like M. Bakhtin, Y. Tynianov, or V. Shklovsky. Dostoevsky's Stepanchikovo Village in the Tynianov's critic became evident that it is a parody of the Gogol's Chosen Passages from Correspondence with his Friends. He opened for us, readers, both writers. But it's more for the specialists. Lay reading is an individualistic love of literature; it's an immersion into a book, one after another, when your life becomes a book. There are two different categories: professional and passion.
I really like this essay. I teach creative writing to college undergrads (I do not have an academic English lit background), and one of the things I am always encouraging them to talk about is their experience of difficulty. I don't want them to regurgitate the points I've made about the texts we read, and I don't even want them to put on their official "analysis" hats. I want them to convey to me as plainly as possible what their real lived experience of making their way through the text was like, even/especially if that experience was punctuated with periods of boredom or confusion. Because if you're not able to observe your own reading experience, honestly, how are you going to shape the experience of your own readers?
“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in,” says Hemingway. “That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.” He opens two bottles of beer and continues: “I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.”
Great discussion and I have couple of thoughts. Most school papers, not just English ones, incorporate a performative element, imho. They are not necessary dishonest, but they push that edge. You can make a good argument for something you don't fully believe. Sometimes you end up believing it also or discover something new. The idea of a correct reading or truth is itself suspect, don't you think? And authors absolutely write things they are not fully aware of. I know I do and I love hearing what readers find in my work that I didn't see. The unconscious is the ultimate creative source. What good criticism does is amplify a personal reading, just like a book group does. Different people find different things there.
I am mostly assuredly a lay reader, and a lay writer about what I read. And thus your essay speaks much to me. I would agree with some of the commenters that that doesn't have to mean that "literary criticism" is useless. (Some of it is, but then so is some of everything.)
Lay reading, though, doesn't mean just reading a book once. You can read a book in a "lay" fashion, and reread it -- multiple times -- in a similar fashion and you will still be understanding more about the book (if it has any depth to it), learning more, enjoying it in different ways. And lay reading can involve something like close reading, or at least very careful, slower, reading.
I really loved your article. I didn't mind the old symbol system of the university although it was just about as useless as you have described. But with the post moderns, it became an undertaking that didn't seem to have much to do with literature. My professors were some of the worst snobs- they called the type of reading most people do "naive reading." I am very old and so have gone through most of the critical fads of English departments. I am very excited about your book. I am sure it will be a wonderful read and important corrective to reading for the meaning "found" by educators.
Thank you. Really appreciate this comment.
Glad your story got so generous. Symbols are summits that represent the struggle to resolve the moil of eternal ambiguity. This is January, the month Janus can stop joyously, furiously, restlessly, resentful, secretly and darkly, with gratitude and humble sadness, looking at himself face to face, and with slightly, but proudly, sentimentaliy regard the past with gentle fondness and remorse, and the future with blind excruciating hope and even craven cunning, the wobbling dagger of a deadly, self-gratifying design. Blake wrote, ALL THINGS POSSIBLE TO BE BELIEVED ARE AN IMAGE OF THE TRUTH, either bitterly gnashing his aching teeth, sneering, or exalting in ambiguity's ambrosial moil.
“English teacher reading” really made me hate Ethan Frome in high school, I’ll tell you that.
That’s because Ethan Frome objectively sucks, which is the reason I did not teach it to my high school students.
"It's off the curriculum."
- Mrs. K. from GROSSE POINTE BLANK
https://746books.com/2014/05/14/no-721-ethan-frome-by-edith-wharton/
I agree with Martin. Hated that book.
Yeah, I definitely still hate Ethan Frome, but I did then, too.
The last comment for this essay was from Jan. 23rd. And it's mid-March. So for me to say something now is, on its face, interrupting the flow of a bunch of other much more *engaged* and currently informed interlocutors who've moved on. Ostensibly, you, the essay's author, has moved on. I want to risk a reply just in case somebody's not quite said it the way I'm thinking it, and that opens up something new for someone. Maybe (as I believe you'd agree) the task of articulating my different understanding (or argument---fine, same thing) will force me to acknowledge closer adherence to your arguments.
---First, I immediately reacted against your validating a 'layreader''s interpretive authority because I hadn't really thought it through. You're absolutely right in a number of contexts. No, I hated friggin school-lit until about my senior year of high school. I had an enormously talented senior-year English teacher. I was coming out of a long fascination, verging on morbid obsession, with fantasy and (I'd say now) a symbolist strain of early-20th-century literature. I'd 'grown-up' enough to become a lover of (I believed) high-minded horror fiction. At 17, 'big fan of Peter Straub, bigger fan of Steven King. And senior lit's requirement to read _Crime and Punishment_ over the summer was sadism. My inflexible principle was I'd really pay attention to the lit when it was as intriguing as a Steven King novel. The senior English teacher assigned us Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and some other O'Connor shorts, concluding with _Wise Blood_. I felt like I recognized those violent, insane people (I was in Lower Alabama in a Catholic high school). In this context, I was a powerfully engaged lay-reader.
---But I didn't get one of the basic O'Connor dynamics, that conscious profanity could be a sort of unconscious desperate, suicidal plea for something 'true', something that was enough-redemptive that it wasn't the shit we settle for. This enormously insightful, patient teacher taught me the move. I wrote my last, longest 'research essay' for that class on Capote's _Other Voices, Other Rooms_. To my mind, if you understood Steven King, you'd see how it links up with Southern Gothic.
---The next year, I was floundering, trying to find what I'd major in (Canadian universities had a tighter selection schedule). I had a superlative professor for modern fiction. He assigned "Wise Blood." I was ready to jump on it. He asked, WTF? I said, "It's speaking to the Grandmother's---the reader's struggle---to see that we're all involved in a sacramental mystery experienced in everyone's life. But we have to be able to look past the limited materialistic rationales that our modern world reinforces. We have to be able to see that mortal horror and disgust are the ways into un-worldly redemption." (I was a very good Catholic schoolboy.)
---He didn't miss a beat. He said, "That's a possible reading. Maybe that's what the author intended. But if you read it like somebody who's reading it for the first time and isn't catechized with mystical RC sacramentalism, then, to the extent that O'Connor sets up parallels to Gospel stories of the Holy Family, her version is plainly the ugliest, most viciously satirical debunking you could imagine. Take it literally, and it's a desecration of orthodox theology." Of course, he was right. He taught me the 'practice' of close-reading (which, as the conservative Southern New critics had articulated it, he really didn't buy. He was atheist, Communist, and for '86 a radical 'Feminist'). I caught onto Deconstructionist methods because it worked the same ways with every text. (He advised against.) After a year, I was convinced that it wasn't necessary to read the novel or the poem---'Just go read the criticism and critique it. That profound stupidity didn't last very long. Finishing my B.A., starting an M.A. at McGill, I wasn't so damn tightly wound to Decon, but I was (so far as I thought) Mr. Critical Theory. The Mentor confessed he'd realized finally he was dumbfounded by the erudition he found in the old 150-70-year-old traditionalist criticism he'd begun paying more attention to because those old-fogey theory-ignorant scholars had been forced to become so intimately familiar with the texts and the contexts of the works they specialized in. That made no sense to me.
---A year later, I was thrown off my Deconstructionist horse and saw I'd never trust it really again. Aesthetics and politics and history and religion and philosophy and economics and race and class and gender were what literary works were about. (And that was reductive.) But you see how after that sort of literary education, I could utterly understand layman's reading as excellent, so long as the layman could understand the words *and the contexts* of the works [she] read. If you've never been taught the basic comedy/tragedy models, why wouldn't you laugh maliciously observing the flawed protagonist thwarted and humiliated? If you're strongly empathetic, why wouldn't you act at a Jacobean play like the ignerrint Scots Highlanders and leap onto the stage with your broadswords to protect Hamlet in Act V? Context is a big deal. If you don't know American racism at a basic level, Huck Finn is every bit the moronic reprobate he's been taught he is. Take race and politics to another level, and perhaps Jim is a grown, experienced, perfectly capable agent who has chosen of necessity to manipulate Huck's emotions in order to facilitate the ruse that he's the boy's inherited slave and so reach the Free States. Taken from that framework, it's not unlikely.
---Think about how easily and intimately Gen Alphars process the double-logic of dank memes and intuitively understand the practical logic of portraying cinema villains. "If he wears a mask, even if we know he's basically decent, he's dehumanized and set-up to be a casualty, usually with 'reason' (within the film's context)." You can say that nobody has to explicitly teach Alphars how the rules of contemporary visual communication work: rules can be inferred from multiple examples. You could also assert that nobody has to explain to the six-year-old brother who sanctimoniously warns his nine-year-old sister, "Mom and Dad don't want you jumping on the bed. And I'll tell." that the nine-year-old sister's acid retort, "DUHHHH-H-H-H . . .!!!" signifies defiant sarcasm. But I'll bet that the little boy's got to get that response in context many times before he twigs. And I'll bet the much-cleverer sister just triumphantly spells it out for him multiple times before he gets it (and begins to exult laying "DUHHHs" on his baby-friends). Common sense became pivotal to liberal tradition as a way of arguing that natural philosophy and natural laws were self-evident. But they always required lots of 'reinforcing' instruction to correct.
---So why should I have gotten wound up and aggravated by the initial mention of authoritative lay-reading? It's poetry. As has been said, if you're going to start out with the violin or the flute, no serious teacher begins by saying, "A musical piece you play on the instrument by yourself is a sonata. We just listened to a sonata. Why don't you just see if you can play your own kind of sonata now that you've been shown how you hold the bow/where you position your lips?" As James Fenton points out in _The Strength of Poetry_, when we ask schoolkids who are able to read and write at age-appropriate learning-levels, "That was a fun poem, right? Why don't you try to write your own poem!" we don't go through elaborate explanations of process and craft. We don't even attempt the level of complex, scaffolded instruction we use for the sublime 5-paragraph essay. We just say, "Why don't you attempt to write a poem?" And then the kids who 'know something' and the kids fortunate enough give the product that wins a particular poetry-teacher's praise realize they're writing poetry. The other kids get told (as you've pointed out), "Maybe if you contemplated more deeply the kind of poem you're really trying to express---your rage against your parents' arbitrary rules, those intriguing but awful abuse experiences . . . 'Don't forget that you make the lines seem sorta meaningful by themselves, even if they continue to the next line. And you shouldn't 'rhyme' things, especially at the end of lines, because that makes it sound like bad Hallmark Card poetry and Boomer rock and community musical theater . . . But repeat words and phrases at different points because that sounds emphatic and demonstrates you're paying attention to how you're intentionally 'crafting' your poem!"
---But it still seems to me that what's evident and persuasive about the ideal of authoritative layman's reading is just what's central to New-Critical close-reading and Decon: If the text reads that way, you can't make its most plausible denotation vanish by wishing. Sure, there are ways of claiming rony, sarcasm, elisions, prevarications, formal distortions, decorum, awareness of prospective censorship and persecution---all these context-warranted, extra-textual interpretive frames could be working, and it's always a critic's prerogative to make claims about what's <un->written in the blank margins. But you can't deny what the text actually expresses according to the most basic contextual understanding of why it's printed just the way it is. You can be 'meta' and say, "The rhetorical question "What's the difference?" here is an oblique way of saying, "Duhhh. There's no difference." But the most basic Deconstructionist move---which was once the first rule of close-reading---is to concede, "The text is demanding we consider what the difference really is."
A brief thought in case someone scrolls through these comments looking for ideas about literary criticism, literary theory, and close reading. They aren't really represented in this story. The central example, of the green light in Gatsby, is an example of the problem of non-intentional criticism: If something wasn't intended, then it's misleading and illegitimate. There have been two principal answers to this objection: first, much of the history of art is known to us through non-intentional readings. We only know some of what Leonardo intended with the Mona Lisa. The intentions of nineteenth-century authors, composers, and artists were sometimes wildly at odds with the reasons their work is valued. (Berlioz was an atheist; Vuillard was an anarchist; Bulwer-Lytton was a classicist.) Second, intentionality itself is elusive. If you're a writer or an artist, you experience this whenever you make art. You may start out with an intention, but then writing intervenes, characters come alive, and your own revisions blur and skew your previous thoughts.
Literary criticism, theory, and close reading can be fascinating and enormously enriching, and in modernism, they are often part of the writing project itself. Ignoring them for the reasons set out in this essay can have the unfortunate effect of cutting you off from large parts of the conversation about contemporary culture and art.
Is the English assignment really teaching you to lie, or is it teaching you to read and perceive through practice? By forcing you through the paces of crafting an argument about a book, does the assignment not make you think about how the literary devices and techniques of the book serve its meaning (whatever that may mean)?
Some teacher or other once said to me "clear writing proceeds from clear thinking, and if you can't articulate your idea it means your thinking is incomplete." I don't think that's entirely true, but certainly crafting a persuasive argument requires a level of engagement and thought that's not required absent the assignment. The hope, I think, is not that you will learn to lie well but that by imitating the processes of analysis you will learn its merits.
I'm skeptical of the distinction between "critical reading" and "lay reading" and suspect it's largely a polemical device designed to elevate the status of folks on one side or the other of the establishment. It seems to me that reading is an enterprise to which each reader brings a set of tools and experiences - sometimes few, sometimes many. There is no distinction between critical and lay reading, just a spectrum of techniques and experiences a reader may bring to a work.
There's no right or wrong approach to reading, though some approaches are well or ill suited to particular works. Sometimes certain critical techniques or tools are essentially necessary to a meaningful understanding and enjoyment of a work, great or pedestrian, and sometimes not. Sometimes critical tools enhance a reader's appreciation for a work or help them derive meaning from it. And sometimes critical tools are counterindicated - they can actively get in the way of enjoying a piece of perfectly good genre fiction, for instance.
This seems to me just an extension of things that are obvious, like, to understand and enjoy a work in English you must be able to understand English. Different tools are required to appreciate different works. What speaks to you may speak to me, or not. Reading is an exercise of taste, and one's tastes are developed by practice and thought.
Perhaps the idea is that "critical reading" means reading with an eye toward doing criticism, especially with the purpose of crafting arguments about the aesthetic value of a work relative to other works. But criticism, I would argue, is a different enterprise entirely from reading, and I'm skeptical that one reads for criticism in a way that is qualitatively different than regular-ass reading. Composing criticism may entail the deployment of a more, well, scholarly set of analytical tools, and the enterprise of criticism may mean devoting a lot more time and attention to using those tools, but at root I think what my English professors do with a book is basically the same as what I do with it, which is basically the same as what an untrained reader does with what they read.