Interjecting myself into the literary criticism debate:
@Fernandel -- I do see your point about the difference between academic criticism and journalistic literary criticism, but ultimately I think it's tangential to the topic originally raised by Rook. Whenever people bash on literary critics in fiction, they're not thinking of the guy who writes the book column in the Sunday paper; they're thinking of academic critics of the type that Vicky and Vyslante have talked about.
Criticism of literary critics tends to fall into one of two categories:
1) Basically revenge-bashing one's middle-school and high-school literature teachers. If you had a your-own-native-language lit teacher at the pre-college level who actually helped you gain an appreciation for the books you were reading instead of making great works of literature a tedious and painful chore, you are a lucky, lucky person. I can't think of a single book I read in any lit class from 7th-12th grade (with the possible exception of
Hamlet) that I would ever want to touch again. You would have to offer either cash payments or threats of violence to get me to come near Steinbeck or Hemingway. (And frankly? High school lit teachers often
deserve mockery.)
2) A fundamental suspicion that the entire
profession of academic literary criticism is a giant circlejerk. The hard sciences are basically independent of humans--gravity, for example, will continue to exist whether or not we care about it. But literature--specifically, the analytical study of "the great works"--exists only within the human circle. There is no objective standard, only subjective ones. There are people who believe that the question "Why is Shakespeare's work great?" is answered by "People who are paid money to write scholarly papers about Shakespeare say so, and they teach their students that, and those students get their English Lit degrees and get jobs being paid to write about Shakespeare." (Point 1, above, only exacerbates this, because unless you are an actual English Lit student you will likely not spend a lot of time in an English Lit classroom in college.) If it's
modern "literature," well, now you get a lot of crossover with the general critique of modern
art, where "What
is Art?" is a valid--and often
necessary--topic of debate.
tl;dr Large amounts of the population believe literary analysis is full of snobs because their encounters with literary analysis boil down to "I am better than you because I
understand this
great work that you don't." It's a frame-of-reference problem, and until people's frame of reference gets changed, then the perception isn't going anywhere.
