In defense of criticism: A theater critic asks what good does it do in an upside-down world
Charles McNultylatimes.com
In defense of criticism: A theater critic asks what good does it do in an upside-down world
At the very minimum, they are people who are – in Susan Sontag’s definition of a writer – “interested in everything”.
Today’s pop culture offers few examples of such people. What we get instead is a superficial and unsatisfying churn of short-term celebs and trends. The space vacated by challenging novels, experimental cinema, and difficult... See more
Today’s pop culture offers few examples of such people. What we get instead is a superficial and unsatisfying churn of short-term celebs and trends. The space vacated by challenging novels, experimental cinema, and difficult... See more
Becoming Cultured
Criticism is a serious intellectual act. It tries to evaluate serious works of art and to place them in the context of what has been done before in that medium or by that artist. This doesn’t mean that critics must limit themselves to work that aims high; they may select some commercial product like Law & Order to make a point about American
... See moreWilliam Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
No thinking person should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment in the humanities.53 A society without historical scholarship is like a person without memory: deluded, confused, easily exploited. Philosophy grows out of the recognition that clarity and logic don’t come easily to us and that we’re better off when our thinking is refined and
... See moreSteven Pinker • Enlightenment Now
To ask, «What is the function of criticism at the present time?» is also to ask two related questions. «What was the function of criticism in the past?» «What could be the function of criticism in the future?» These are anxious questions. One would not ask them if all was well in the state of cultural production and circulation. Nor would one ask... See more
Frank Donoghue, the author of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, writes that liberal arts education has been systemically dismantled for decades. Any form of learning not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad,
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