The following is from the first part of Northrop Frye's "The Archetypes of Literature".

" ...I say only that the principles by which one can distinguish a significant from a meaningless statement in criticism are not clearly defined. Our first step, therefore, is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism: that is, talking about literature in a way that cannot help to build up a systemic structure of knowledge. Casual value judgements belong not to criticism but to the history of taste, and reflect, at best only the social and psychological compulsions which prompted their utterance. All judgements in which the values are not based on literary experiance but are sentimental or derived from religous or political predjudice may be regarded as casual. Sentimental judgements are usually based on nonexistent categories or antitheses( "Shakespeare studied life, Milton books") or on a visceral reaction to the writer's personality. The literary chitchat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange is pseudo-criticism."

Dedicated as Frye is to lay out criticism's scientific method, he bluntly rules out appraisals of a book that do not spring from a knowledge of literature but from the reviewers personal likes or dislikes( "casual value judgements" again). If this, which a great many of us probably associate with the critical profession, is indeed pseudo-criticism as Frye asserts, then criticism is in need of a serious re-vamp.

Perhaps I'm too engrained in the notion of typical criticism(I read lot's of film reviews, which are positivley soaking in pseudo-criticism), but I find it a bit difficult to wrap my head around completely doing in with value judgements(Harold Bloom evidently feels the same, judging from portions of his Anatomy of Criticism). Undoubtedly this is for the best, since they are ultimately futile. But does that reduce the critic to merely tracing patterns and similarities and dissimliarties? And I can just imagine Northrop Frye protesting "And what's wrong with that?!"

At some later time perhaps I will look into this a bit more, but I think I've run out of stamina right now.