I'm unfamiliar with Blake Smith's work, or with the usual tenor of literary criticism in general. By about the third paragraph I wondered if this was what the word "snark" was invented for, or the phrase "backhanded compliment", and, now, why do I want to emulate it? Just how different from a large language model am I?
I'd characterize it as sending up the genre of criticism as performed by fresh college grads. The piece meanders in and out of the regime, but I found it funny largely because I had to read a lot of the form he's taking the piss of here in college, and have even written some of my own under duress!
>... we’re meant to be lead [sic].
I always mistrust litcrit with obvious grammatical errors.
Is it, though? Grammar is more like a set of tools than a rigid mechanized system. Formal proofs have recursion and logical rules which generate vast structures, structures which, in our era of computation, can move and act without our full understanding of their function. But whenever we seek to describe how something functions, even in our most clear and rigid proofs we use natural language, and I'm sure many of those proofs contain "grammatical errors."
This article seems angry and I’m not so sure it’s justified in its anger