The language of critics, and of artists of the kind who pay attention to critics, has become exceedingly odd: not talk about feelings or intellectual affirmations–not talk about moving and surprising twists of plot or wonderful characters and ideas–but sentences full of large words like hermeneutic, heuristic, structuralism, formalism, or opaque language, and full of fine distinctions–for instance those between modernist and post-modernist–that would make even an intelligent cow suspicious. Though more difficlt than ever before to read, criticism has become trivial.
– John Gardner, On Moral Fiction