Agree with your last paragraph. As Ray Bradbury once said of fiction and of painting, it's play at its highest level.
To play devil's advocate, at the same time I think even criticism/literary history/etc. needs a certain baseline of factual accuracy. For example, a film critic should at least avoid major factual errors about the film in question and its production.
Surely your devil's advocate objection is correct--critics should tell the truth, and not just about the work they examine but about history and about the arguments of people with whom they disagree. Freedom to interpret iconoclastically is not the same as freedom to fabulate in the mode of fiction.
But while some reviewers do some limited fact-checking (e.g. pointing out errors that they notice), and papers that are egregiously inaccurate probably won't make it through, peer review doesn't include formal fact-checking. In fact, in the critic Brook Thomas's recent book about Reconstruction, Thomas notes that major literary critics Lauren Berlant and Walter Benn Michaels have mistakenly argued that the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution gave Black men the right to vote--in peer-reviewed work! The forms of rigor maintained by humanistic peer review don't ensure factual accuracy--I don't think that's the top priority of the process.
There's a CS Lewis passage (I think in An Experiment in Criticism) in which he critiques the kind of review that calls an ending rushed or a particular scene labored over. He argues that to do that is to not critique the work at hand but instead to make up a story (which may or may not be true) about how it was made.
Agree with your last paragraph. As Ray Bradbury once said of fiction and of painting, it's play at its highest level.
To play devil's advocate, at the same time I think even criticism/literary history/etc. needs a certain baseline of factual accuracy. For example, a film critic should at least avoid major factual errors about the film in question and its production.
Surely your devil's advocate objection is correct--critics should tell the truth, and not just about the work they examine but about history and about the arguments of people with whom they disagree. Freedom to interpret iconoclastically is not the same as freedom to fabulate in the mode of fiction.
But while some reviewers do some limited fact-checking (e.g. pointing out errors that they notice), and papers that are egregiously inaccurate probably won't make it through, peer review doesn't include formal fact-checking. In fact, in the critic Brook Thomas's recent book about Reconstruction, Thomas notes that major literary critics Lauren Berlant and Walter Benn Michaels have mistakenly argued that the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution gave Black men the right to vote--in peer-reviewed work! The forms of rigor maintained by humanistic peer review don't ensure factual accuracy--I don't think that's the top priority of the process.
Another related thought occurs to me.
There's a CS Lewis passage (I think in An Experiment in Criticism) in which he critiques the kind of review that calls an ending rushed or a particular scene labored over. He argues that to do that is to not critique the work at hand but instead to make up a story (which may or may not be true) about how it was made.