Hyper-Elitism in Writing Literary Criticisms: Theories and References

Abstract

Current day literary criticisms written in world englishes often seem to be a little hard to comprehend for readers because of critics’ tendency to use too much decorative language with too many theoretical views, jargons, and references of different sorts just to stick to an assumed standard of scholarly writing. This paper, based on a generalized study though, considers that assumed standard hyper elitist, which is affecting the easy entrance of a considerable portion of literary audience into the literary realm where the popularity in the form of reader-friendliness and comprehensibility of literary criticisms are compromised, and thoughts of some creditable thinkers remain unnoticed only because those promising thoughts apparently fail to be expressed in that supposed standard of language. Keeping the purpose of literary criticisms in mind, this paper places forth a seemingly valid question whether this sophisticated way of expressing is really mandatory or not, as the word ‘standard’ itself is subjected to be modified when needed, and the postmodern approach to the literary regime really tends to unsettle the frame of any standardization and deny the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’. Thus, speculated implications of the paper included that the accessibility of greater number of audience into the arena of literary criticisms might be more liberally considered by established but elitist critics, while the stress of synthesized elitism in writing criticisms might also be mitigated for neophytes among critics.