Time & Perspective Quote by Leslie Fiedler

Fiedler is quietly trying to rescue criticism from the courtroom. If we read criticism like history or science, we treat it as a report: verify the facts, check the citations, weigh the evidence, render a verdict. He’s arguing that good criticism doesn’t win by being right; it wins by being alive. The real standard isn’t whether the critic’s interpretation is provable, but whether it changes the way you can see and feel the work afterward.

That’s a pointed claim coming from a mid-century American critic who watched academic literary studies drift toward professionalization: specialized vocabulary, method as credential, argument as product. Fiedler’s move is to insist that criticism is closer to art-making than to knowledge-production. It’s an expressive form with its own aesthetic stakes: voice, metaphor, rhythm, daring, surprise. The critic isn’t a lab technician measuring meaning; the critic is a performer staging an encounter between reader and text.

The subtext is also defensive, almost insurgent. If criticism is judged like science, it becomes disposable the moment a new theory arrives. If it’s judged like art, it can endure as a piece of writing even when you disagree with it. That’s Fiedler protecting the essay as a genre and the critic as a public intellectual, not merely a specialist. He’s asking for criticism that risks something: not just conclusions, but style; not just interpretation, but temperament.