An explosion of online literary criticism is settling down into an interesting heap of debris. Over the last few days our feeds—I say “our,” since together we form the kind of collaborative group that Stanley Fish would call an “interpretive community”—have rumbled with talk about “Cat Person.” Kristen Roupenian’s story of a bad date has invited a lot of different readings and prompted a lot of good conversations. We’ve talked about genre, narrative voice, “relatability,” and creating bodies with words. Some of us were unimpressed, while others snarled at the unimpressed’s incomprehension of Roupenian’s achievement. All agreed that it was an unusual phenomenon, a short story going viral, and that was a kind of news.



Since the story was about the awkward, sometimes menacing push-pull between a young woman and her older male date, various outlets have woven this piece of fiction into the ongoing conversation about sexual harassment, as if it were a personal essay or reported piece. “It has women saying, in other words, ‘Yeah, us too,’” wrote Olga Khazan in The Atlantic. While it is totally legitimate for a reader to respond that way, as an approach to criticism it turns the story at hand into a tool for digging in the hole of reality, rather than an imagined world that has its own rules.

The truly interesting thing about those articles, however, is that they demonstrate the huge gap between the new literary criticism taking place online and the media’s ability to respond to it.

In this case, the media has been thrust in the position of the literary critic, drawing lines between the artwork and the broader culture. This isn’t a bad development, exactly—it’s great that a short story is making headlines. But it is also worth noting that the boundaries of literary criticism, at least as they are traditionally conceived, are being exceeded across the internet. The response to “Cat Person” is the latest evidence that we have entered new territory for online criticism, and no one quite knows what to make of it.

Rupi Kaur is a good example of the unsatisfying way in which literature, social media, and criticism intersect these days. When the 25-year-old poet hit the bestseller list, she got the smirky profile treatment in The Cut, which made Kaur look a bit silly for caring more about book jackets (“I’ll collect a lot of covers that inspire me”) than their contents. This gentle mockery stemmed from Kaur’s astonishing career trajectory. She seemed to have spun her popularity on social media into literary fame, to the detriment of Poetry writ large.