What’s happened to literary criticism, asks James Wood. It’s been replaced by academic-speak. “For the first time in history, many poets and novelists are graduates of English studies, many of them put through the theory machine for good measure. Writers and academics teach together, attend conferences together, and sometimes almost speak the same language (Rushdie’s essays and academic post-colonialist discourse; DeLillo’s fiction and academic postmodern critique). But during the same period, literary criticism as a discourse available for, and even attractive to, the common reader has all but disappeared.”