Seriousness as a literary criterion.

Let say that literary criticism's most important task is to distinguish serious work from what we might call the "upper-middlebrow". But what does serious mean when it comes to literary writing? I'm wondering about this while in the middle of reading Andrew O'Hagan's Personality (2003) which I think is about as good an example of an uppermiddlebrow literary novel as you can find of its period.

Is literary criticism a failed project?

Is literary criticism a failed project? Or, more to the point, was it ever anything else?

In reading for the talk I have to give at the SCT I am thinking that it is indeed at Cambridge that modern literary criticism establishes itself. If Eliot enunciates its basic principles and I.A. Richards as it were scienticizes and academicises it, then Leavis is lit crit's St Paul, i.e. he takes responsibility for the new discipline's institutional continuation as well as its doctrinal expansion. But lit crit was always bound to fail: its core supposition, namely that experience and literary writing have an especially immediate relation to one another, is wrong. A second of its presuppositions is also very problematic, namely its historicised dehistoricisation: its sense that modernity has undone proper relationships between language, thought and feeling, and that the literature which is where, and only where, those proper relationships may survive, belongs to a sequence and path of transmission (tradition) whose temporality is not that of history itself.

So literary criticism's invention can itself only be understood in terms of certain historical events, in particular: the resistance to democratization and, then, the first world war. (It's not an accident that Leavis suffered serious war trauma).

Literary criticism's more general original conditions of possibility include (in no particular order):
1) competition between the newer provincial universities and Oxford and Cambridge
2) the link between Germany and philology (the reigning academic mode of approach to literature), which gave a fillip to the anti-philology movement before, during and after WW1 and opened up a space for the new formation;
3) the overpowering experential impact of the war
4) the need for accessible civil service exams
5) the contigency through which the leading media propreitor, Harmondsworth, endowed a chair at Cambridge in the new field (he did so presumably to stall the Literature v Journalism division which runs high culture from Forster's Howards End through to the Leavises and Thompson.
6) the linguistic turn which is apparent in Russell's paper "On Denotation" (1905) and which brings Frege's work to Britain as well as in George Moore's turn to analysis and common sense out of his moral intuititionism. Note in particular Moore's report on Wittgenstein's lectures around 1930 (in Philosophical Papers) which, where W. remarks on aesthetics, chime in with Leavis's pedagogical practice of eliciding determined consent and agreement about the seriousness and success of a literary passage.

And in response to Facebook comments 0n this (Ben Myers, Paul Bowman), I added this, which points further in the direction I'm going:

I guess I don't think English departments actually do literary criticism in the Eliot, Richards, Leavis sense nor have they done it since Leavisism failed: they do historicisms, structuralisms, political hermeneutics of one sort or another etc but not literary criticism as originally understood. They can't; it's impossible. (Which is what is good about literary criticism.)