Certainly, a book titled The Death of the Critic is meant to turn heads, as is the book's already controversial thesis: that in order for the critic to complete his responsibilities to society, he must evaluate a work on a universal scale of good or bad. Both the title and the argument have produced their fair share of responses already, both in the blogosphere, the traditional mainstream media, and sources that reside somewhere in between. Indeed, the book can now be seen as the most comprehensive summary of the arguments for the decline of the critic that have been circulating in disparate sources this decade. But as soon as the book hit the market, it's been largely misinterpreted as either a screed against the Internet, a rigid defense of classicist reasoning, or a stinging rebuttal of postmodernism. All of those are there, but the core of the book is something different: an intellectual history of how the role of the critic has wavered over time, why it peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, and why the critic is no longer around.

The Death of the Critic could just as easily be read as a primer text on the history of literary criticism, going from Plato and Aristotle through Horace, medieval and renaissance scholars, all the way to modernity and beyond. The only reason that using the book would pose pedaggical challenges is McDonald's inherent bias towards the materials he's studying. His tastes obviously lie with the more rigid, scientific critics such as I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis and the great advocates of the Western tradition such as Matthew Arnold and T.S. Elliot. The critic is at his most useful, in McDonald's line, as a public figure and grand arbiter of taste, blurring the lines between journalistic and academic enterprises (it should be noted that as a University lecturer writing a book to a more general audience, this book also blurs those lines). This was the role served by Kenneth Tynan, Pauline Kael, Harold Hobson and Clement Greenberg, and a role that has been unfilled in the last 30 years.

The reason, as we can easily predict, is the rise of postmodernist denial of the importance of the critic, the blurring of the lines between politics and literary analysis, and an overwhelming culture of relativism and the sublimation of the Western canon. McDonald invokes the Ratner effect, where a product rapidly loses credibility when the producer of the product insults its quality. A cultural ship is listless without a critic at the helm deciding where it should go, and such a ship requires a grand tradition place a new work on the map. This would explain the lack of unmitigated great works in the poststructuralist era; saying a work is a classic requires a bevy of other classics for comparison.