"Legitimate" as she was using this term seems to mean "conventional," or at least it refers to something that would be considered respectable by typical teachers or students of literature. As far as that goes, I think one must consider whether and how the format, method, style, length and audience for literary criticism affect its legitimacy.
What will we find? That many of the traits of traditional literary criticism are essential to carry forward into the digital domain, but that issues of audience, length, and media use are prominent incompatibilities between traditional literary criticism and emerging best practices in online writing.
By the end of this post, I will turn the question of legitimacy around. Rather than thinking of traditional academic and print literary criticism as the baseline for legitimacy, I will work from the assumption that online writing is the default intellectual medium and therefore literary criticism, to be legit in the 21st century, must play by the rules of the emerging dominant cultural medium.
