Clearly, I didn't read it until after I made my last post, so I covered a lot of familiar ground, and the author and I arrived to many of the same conclusions.

I love reading that kind of stuff, although I take literary criticism with a huge grain of salt...its always an equal-parts mixture of the obvious and the unprovable. Still, it is always valuable to follow along with a good mind as it processes the same data. Even if you don't agree with a word of it, they invariably have insights into the material that one can profit from.

The problem with litcrit is that you never really know what an author had in mind; very often the author himself doesn't! A novel may be a carefully devised intellectual and logical exercise, but there is always deep subconscious processing that goes into it. I've even caught myself doing things in my writing, upon rereading it years later, that I was not aware I was doing at the time I wrote it. Sometimes, I must confess, I review something I wasn't particularly happy with when I wrote it and tell myself, 'Damn, that's really good!'

I know exactly what you mean about "profound writer's block for fiction". It pisses me off, too.

I guess its the difference between art and craft. It's a bitter lesson I learned about myself (in another context) when I finally gave up on my childhood dream of doing creative work in physics and mathematics. I could bust my butt and work the problems, even get the right answers, but I never was able to do really creative work in the field. Some of us will never play Carnegie Hall, no matter how hard we practice, practice, practice. It will always be piano bar for me.