rambling thoughts

For my advanced writing class we were assigned to read eight essays and then proceed to critique or analyze the content and style of these pieces. All the essays I read were based off of personal experiences and dealt deeply with emotions and allowed room for the reader to openly relate to the ideas. I guess my question is how do we connect the concepts and techniques we are learning in literary criticism, where we are basing most of our discussions off of academic essays, to writing that is established off of more emotional experiences? And is literary criticism even supposed to be used on this level? As I was writing the critiques I found myself thinking about many of the essays we read in our class. The issue of the author being less important then the reader struck me the most and I was left wondering if in these circumstances the author should be removed from the picture. I found that after reading the eight essays I was drawn to who the author was and felt like I personally knew them because of the door into their life that they opened for the reader. For some reason I found this distracting. I found meaning and was able to critique the essays on a basic structural feel but I wasn’t able to get past the fact that these essays were almost like reading another person’s diary. I couldn’t get over the fact that I was determining whether these experiences were valid or not, whether they spoke strongly or not. Maybe disconnecting the author from the piece of writing is necessary sometimes. I’m not sure. I don’t even know if any of my ramblings were coherent but I found myself connecting the essays I’ve read in our literary criticism class to the experience of reading these more personal essays. Is there a difference in the way we should critique theses different forms of writing? Should we focus less on the author in order to derive more understanding from the text itself?

I don’t feel like I’m making any sense. So I’m going to leave it at that.