If critics can fulfill this single function, if they can carry the mundane everyday business of literary criticism to the level of art, then they can be ambitious and brash; they can connect books to larger currents in the culture; they can identify movements and waves in fiction; they can provoke discussion; they can carry books back into the middle of conversations at dinner parties. Here I think of James Wood’s essay “Hysterical Realism,” which skewers the pyrotechnical trendiness of a certain generation of writers; or of Janet Malcolm’s “Silent Woman,” which exposes the psychological ambiguities at play in the production of biography; or of Virginia Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own,” which is essentially a dazzling novel on the difficulties of writing as a woman; or of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” which takes on the arduous, paradoxical labor of criticism attacking criticism. What separates all of these works from the din of opinion, from the impassioned amateur review, from the grouchy blogged snark or the Facebook status posting, is the beauty in the sentence, the craft itself.

Consider great and exquisite lines of criticism, from Jarrell: “If Picasso limited himself in anything he would not be Picasso: he loves the world so much he wants to steal it and eat it.” Or from Woolf: “Mr. Joyce’s indecency in ‘Ulysses’ seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows. At moments, when the window is broken, he is magnificent. But what a waste of energy!” It is the poetry of these descriptions that rises above, that describes, anatomizes and pins down. Here we can observe, in action, another secret purpose of the critic: to entertain. Great criticism is more fun, when it comes down to it, more passionate and more useful and more economical than scrolling the stars of the Amazon critic who reviews, say, Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” thus: “It seemed trivial and after getting my interest, it would end up talking about someone or a period in time totally different. It left me confused, but still interested. I should say I listened to an audiobook version. Possibly that contributed to confusion. This is supposed to be a really great book according to Oprah.”

To those who doubt the beleaguered but well-spoken critic’s influence, his ability to provoke or sway, I would submit a tiny piece of anecdotal evidence from the classroom. I have seen students rush out to buy “Anna Karenina” because an essay by James Wood made them feel that Tolstoy was essential. If it’s even just these couple of students, alone on planet Earth, who have read that essay and rushed out, those couple of students are to me sufficient proof of the robustness and purpose of the eloquent critic, of his power to awake and enlighten, of his absolutely crucial place in our world.

But let’s go back to the seductive and dramatic despair we in the business of writing and thinking about books continue to feel. Is the entire rich and textured English language really on the verge of being reduced to text messages? Can an 18-year-old really not understand why a sentence of Hemingway or Wharton is more charismatic than a tweet? I am not entirely convinced. We could view the sight of a well-dressed businessman in a houndstooth suit reading Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story” or David Mitchell’s “Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” on an iPad as he waits in the beige antechamber of the doctor’s office as a sign not of the death of the book, but of the irrepressibility of literature.

To the dangerously dwindling reading public — and to the serious, unshaven young man in a coffee shop somewhere in Brooklyn, just now shooting me a dirty look as he bangs out his essay on the death of the critic and the death of literature and the death of our attention spans on his shiny laptop — I humbly suggest that the situation is more stable than we suppose. The ancient power of a story well told will endure, along with its interpreters and critics, and technology will continue to evolve and unsettle, to dazzle and madden us, to create its cultural crises and elicit its handwringing. I think we can say with confidence that in 200 years Anna Karenina and her men will still exist. And the iPad — who knows?