Activity

the communication [...] is in an important sense 'phatic'; a deployment of the appropriate forms and conventions of discourse which has as its goal nothing more than the delightful exercise of taste and reason

folded into a language at once mannerly and pellucid

light, eirenic, and urbane at the very point of satiric ridicule

The very business of criticism, with its minatory overtones of conflict and dissension

the ineluctably negative movement of criticism