John Carey

John Carey (5 April 1934 – 11 December 2025) was a British literary critic, and Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford from 1975 (emeritus from 2001). He was known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expounded in several books, twice chairing the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2003, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.

3 quotes found

"As an element in the reaction against mass values the intellectuals brought into being the theory of the avant-garde, according to which the mass is, in art and literature, always wrong. What is truly meritorious in art is seen as the prerogative of a minority, the intellectuals, and the significance of this minority is reckoned to be directly proportionate to its ability to outrage and puzzle the mass. Though it usually purports to be progressive, the avant-garde is consequently always reactionary. That is, it seeks to take literacy and culture away from the masses, and so to counteract the progressive intentions of democratic educational reform."

- John Carey

• 0 likes• Literary critics• People from London• Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature• Fellows of the British Academy• University of Oxford faculty•
"Carey argued that the intelligentsia was driven to create literary modernism by a profound loathing of ordinary common readers. The intellectuals feared the masses not because they were illiterate but because, by the early twentieth century, they were becoming more literate, thanks to public education, adult education, scholarships, and cheap editions of the great books. If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader could not understand it."

- John Carey

• 0 likes• Literary critics• People from London• Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature• Fellows of the British Academy• University of Oxford faculty•
"Carey is extremely well read, and uses his impressive knowledge to point out some of the sillinesses of writers, such as in their attacks on "tinned food" and cremation as possible causes for the decline of British civilization. He is a healthy questioner of received opinions. It forces one to rethink one's preconceptions."