It’s funny to look back, ten years on, and realise I’m still just doing the stuff I was trained to do at university. It’s essentially just close reading – I like to pick up a game and look at one facet or another. It’s not a strict rule, but it’s pretty clearly my bread and butter. I don’t really do all that much of anything else. I don’t really write about the state of the industry, about unions or layoffs, like you’d find at Aftermath. I don’t write personal essays, I don’t really write ‘commentary’, the sort of columnist-style opinion pieces, and I don’t write reviews. It’s mostly just close reading, close criticism and analysis of games. Since dropping the religion section, I’ve been doodling my way through music and books, but still with that same sort of lens. I’ll talk about structure and form, style, the art of how something’s put together, but I’m not here to evaluate, say, historical accuracy.

Take for instance Lee Morrissey’s 2007 book The Constitution of Literature, where Morrissey explores the history of literary criticism as it relates to the public sphere. The public sphere is obviously the domain or region of ‘the public’, imagined as something like the collective presence of society. It’s imagined as a counterbalance to the power of the state, and therefore constitutive of our democracy. Often it’s implicitly invoked by news media, especially traditional forms like print newspapers or television – they’re bringing issues into the public sphere, bringing them to the attention of the public. The concept is similarly invoked whenever we refer to the public good, or something being in the public interest – both of these rely on concepts of the public sphere as a broader space for the operations of ‘the public’, so-called. The concept originates in the work of Jürgen Habermas, and particularly his 1962 work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In that work, Habermas traces the evolution of the public sphere through the Renaissance and into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He argues that literary criticism, as a phenomenon, is associated with the emergence of the public sphere. The basic argument runs like this. In the early days of the printing press in Europe, printing was subject to censorship by the monarchs, who controlled what could or couldn’t be published. As that monarchical power waned, more stuff got published, including work that criticised the monarchy (see, for instance, previous discussions on Milton). Democracy rises along with the unshackled printing press, and we enter into an age of print-democracy, where the democratic spirit coexists with the right to publish freely.

Obviously that’s not a simple correspondence: the journey towards universal suffrage is complex (and ongoing), and the right to publish is balanced against censorship laws that prohibit certain types of speech. Even so, that’s the basic arc of the thesis – from a monopoly of power under the monarch to a diverse age of print-democracy. In that context, you can almost think of the public sphere as the space within which books and other print materials can be published and sold. That’s maybe an oversimplification – the public sphere does have an economic aspect, but it’s not just an economic exercise. It’s also a social exercise, a question of which ideas are allowed or encouraged to circulate, which ideas are socially tolerated. For instance, today you can write a book against the power of the monarchy without getting arrested. You can publish papers critiquing the government or the wealthy. If you were to whip up hatred and cruelty, we might expect that a healthy public sphere would reject it on principle – it might not be banned or censored, per se, but a healthy public sphere might simply leave it by the wayside. Under print-democracy, what we print is seen as an expression of our public sphere, of our society as a whole. Literary criticism, in turn, is writing that critiques writing, participation in the democratic project that critiques and sharpens that project. It’s an intervention. It urges us on towards the best of print, and, insofar as print and democracy are linked, the fulfilment of the democratic spirit. Literary criticism activates and uplifts the project of print-democracy.

That’s quite heady stuff – and there are a number of critiques of this concept of the public sphere. For instance, not everybody gets to be in the public sphere as an equal participant. That seems like a fairly obvious limitation. Morrissey’s criticism takes a historical approach: it regards the nature of English literary criticism in the early 17th century. Where Habermas argues that literary criticism is a function of print-democracy, almost one of its higher forms, Morrissey trawls through the writings of early literary critics, like Dryden, Pope, and Addison, and argues – actually, they weren’t all that keen on print-democracy. “Literacy turns out to have been a politically ambivalent image of democracy for early English literary critics,” he claims. England had been through a brutal civil war, and the unprecedented execution of a king overseen by Parliament. “Access to print in the 1640s was considered, at least for the next 130 years, as having contributed to political violence at the highest levels.” Where Habermas sees early literary criticism as in some sense enacting the democratic project, Morrissey sees it as a containing, neutralizing force, drawn up by people scarred by the heritage of the civil war trying to limit and control print, which had a role in exacerbating the conflict. It wasn’t about the freedom of the people, he argues, or about their intellectual liberty. It was about telling people what to like and what to read. It was about settling and containing the volatile printed form. It was a form of social control.

Really, I’m not best-placed to weigh in on that sort of argument. It’s a historical argument about the development of literary criticism and how it related to this evolving idea of ‘the public’. That’s an argument best left to the historians. At best we can maybe observe some broader debates around controlling or directing access to texts. In their 2021 book The Library: A Fragile History, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen write about debates amongst librarians as to which books should or shouldn’t be included in public libraries. Historically, books had been collected by monasteries, for religious study, or later by white-collar professionals who needed a series of books for their work – lawyers, doctors, historians, or even clerical administrators with complex business filings. You had aristocrats and royals who would collect for show, obviously, but otherwise the bulk of these collections actually had a commercial or religious function. The idea of reading for pleasure (which mostly means reading fiction) doesn’t come into force until, say, the 1700s or 1800s. It relied on widespread literacy and a monied class that had leisure time and disposable income, enough either to subscribe to lending libraries or to purchase new books outright. Their reading was, again, subject to debates around whether or not fiction is good for you – whether it benefits the mind, whether it uplifts the individual in a socially responsible way. Pettegree and der Weduwen hold up Jane Austen as a typical example of this tension:

“This complex relationship, between a taste for fiction and a continuing sense of its harmful effects, is beautifully captured in the works of Jane Austen, where the female protagonists more addicted to novels are those drawn to shallow men, and most likely to elope with ensigns in handsome uniforms. Yet Austen cared deeply whether the public read her novels, and also patronised the more upmarket circulating libraries.”

While some libraries thought of fiction as a sort of gateway drug, leading readers to more serious non-fiction texts, Pettegree and der Weduwen note that by the 1890s, fiction made up 65 to 90% of all borrowed books. Librarians responded by shifting their gaze, trying to direct readers towards “the right sort of fiction” – again repeating this concept of readers who need to be educated, who need to be directed and guided. Morrissey sees early literary criticism as one of those sites of control. We can see similar patterns in how libraries negotiated their catalogues, trying to guide readers towards the right type of book (whatever that might have meant).

Morrissey writes that in the wake of the English Civil War, the explosion of new printed texts arguably created the class of literary critics. “The sheer quantity of new titles called for – produced, one could say – critics, professional readers who could help others find their way through the thicket of these new books.” There’s a practical component, but also a political component. Both critics and librarians are seen as guides, as guardians – they are always guiding towards something, in favour of this or that. It’s for democracy, for stability, for the public good. They are curators, and that curative process says something about who we are and where we’re going. And it does that in the public sphere. Morrissey argues that early literary criticism isn’t some utopian enactment of the democratic spirit. He might be right, but it clearly takes place in the public sphere. It functions as a form of representative publicness. The public is constructed and shaped through print, and these debates about its proper form continue through to the present day. We see the same discourse extended to the internet – it’ll rot your brain, it’s bad for us, it’s the new public sphere. Access, right reading, the democratic spirit. I don’t really feel equipped to offer any answers, but there are parallels in the conversation.