"Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word"
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There is something deliciously fatalistic in Cooley's line: the critic as a small-time chess player staring down an opponent who cannot be checkmated. "Every literary critic believes" isn’t just a generalization; it’s a quiet roast. Cooley frames criticism less as service to literature than as an ego-project, powered by the fantasy that interpretation can freeze meaning in place and lock it down for good.
The engine here is the phrase "outwit history". History, in Cooley’s setup, isn’t a record of events; it’s the endless, humiliating revision of what we thought we knew. Canons shift, tastes turn, politics reclassify authors, and whole genres get retroactively upgraded from "trash" to "important". The critic wants to be the one who anticipated the turn, who planted the flag early, who can say: I saw it first, I named it correctly, I still control the frame. That’s the subtext of "the last word" - not merely being right, but being final.
Cooley wrote across a late-20th-century landscape where academic criticism was booming and splintering: theory wars, increasingly specialized vocabularies, the professionalization of interpretation. His sentence punctures that atmosphere with a minimalist needle. It suggests criticism is often less an encounter with art than a bid for permanence, a way of laundering one’s anxieties about relevance into authoritative prose.
The sting is that Cooley doesn’t exempt himself. Writers critique; critics write. The desire for the last word is the oldest literary impulse there is - and history, reliably, keeps talking.
The engine here is the phrase "outwit history". History, in Cooley’s setup, isn’t a record of events; it’s the endless, humiliating revision of what we thought we knew. Canons shift, tastes turn, politics reclassify authors, and whole genres get retroactively upgraded from "trash" to "important". The critic wants to be the one who anticipated the turn, who planted the flag early, who can say: I saw it first, I named it correctly, I still control the frame. That’s the subtext of "the last word" - not merely being right, but being final.
Cooley wrote across a late-20th-century landscape where academic criticism was booming and splintering: theory wars, increasingly specialized vocabularies, the professionalization of interpretation. His sentence punctures that atmosphere with a minimalist needle. It suggests criticism is often less an encounter with art than a bid for permanence, a way of laundering one’s anxieties about relevance into authoritative prose.
The sting is that Cooley doesn’t exempt himself. Writers critique; critics write. The desire for the last word is the oldest literary impulse there is - and history, reliably, keeps talking.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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