This is an exceptionally fine piece, explaining the logic of reviewing, by James Wood.  He means it to speak about the logic of his own kind of reviewing, reviewing of literary works, but it seems to me to speak of larger issues than that.  

It has a great number of things to recommend it--its prickly defensiveness about being severe in criticizing what others think is wonderful (I'm with Wood on most of that), its awareness that we seem to over-value what we judge to be "smart" when actually what we call "smart" is mostly a matter of hyperactive observation, not thinking, and its defense of the autonomy of the novel as a thing in itself, not a stand in for some other thing.  Much academic writing seems often to fall into that trap, too--so much writing in Politics departments is an attempt to be anthropology or philosophy or economics; so much in English wants to be politics; so much in History wants to be literature; so much in religious studies wants to be, well, anything but whatever golem we've dreamed up "religious studies" to be.  Each thing is what it is, and not another thing; we ought to listen to Bishop Butler on that.

But, above all, I found this piece useful for its careful enumeration of the tasks of a critic. He writes: 

"I like the idea of a criticism that does three things at once: speaks about fiction and verse as writers speak about their craft; writes criticism journalistically, with verve and style, for a common reader; and bends this criticism back toward the academy in the hope of influencing the kind of writing that is done there (of course, such criticism has also learned a great deal from academic scholarship and theory)."

When we think about "public intellectuals," that seems to me an exceptionally useful description of a certain species of a text-based public intellectual.  Furthermore:

"A great deal of criticism is not in fact especially analytical but a kind of persuasive redescription. Sometimes to hear a poet or a fine critic read a poem aloud is to have been party to a critical act; there is a good reason, after all, why writers have always been very interested in actors and acting—there is a sense in which the actor is the purest, the first critic. The written equivalent of the reading of a poem or a play aloud is the retelling of the literature one is talking about; the good critic has an awareness that criticism means, in part, telling a good story about the story you are criticizing."

Both of these seem right to me, and worth our wide consideration.  The kind of general writing that is "persuasive redescription" is deeply publicly undervalued, almost as publicly undervalued as it is likely to be privately appreciated, and almost as privately appreciated as it is difficult to accomplish.  (Try it, sometime.)  In any event, it's all good--read it.

Oh, and understand what he says about the joint value of affirmation and criticism.  You can't have one without the other.  That may be why so many academic reviews are so dreary.  In fact, the only academic reviewer I have recently come across who seems to approach this ideal is Arnaldo Momigliano, and he's dead.  A couple of his students do it as well--Peter Brown, Anthony Grafton--and a few others--Helen Vendler, occasionally Updike, Henry James.  Maybe Christopher Ricks, but more in his critical monographs, I think.  Wood mentions Virginia Woolf so I'll go back to her and check.  Anyway, some more reading to do, there.  Which is nice.