The Literary Theory Handbook (Wiley Blackwell Literature Handbooks)

by Gregory Castle

Oscar Wilde understood this well when he linked the artist and the critic in terms of their shared creation of a new aesthetic experience. For him, the best criticism treats the work of art “as a starting point for a new creation” and, further, the highest criticism “fills with wonder a form which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely” (150). Wilde’s insight is very close to that of hermeneutical critics, who devised techniques for reading sacred and historical texts, for both insist that the reader must listen to what the text has to tell us.