The Cultural Critics

The Cultural Critics

Author: Lesley Johnson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-22

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1003821847

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Originally published in 1979, the central focus of this study is the concept of culture as employed by English literary intellectuals over the preceding 100 years, a period characterized by a constant process of re-definition and change. The tradition of criticism in which these intellectuals wrote represented the artistic imagination as a moral force in society and a fundamental mechanism for social change. The author traces this tradition through the writings of various English intellectuals, using the three main figures of Matthew Arnold, F. R. Leavis and Raymond Williams to elucidate the concept. She shows, through the writings of their contemporaries, how the concept was employed and modified, and her analysis ranges from J. S. Mill, John Ruskin and William Morris, through George Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot and R. H. Tawney to Richard Hoggard, Richard Wollheim and R. S. Peters. By discussing the questions of the role of art in society and examining their treatment by different groups of intellectuals, the author has supplied a basis for a forceful critique of the quality of life in modern industrial society. This book will be of interest to students of literature, cultural history and the sociology of culture.


Cultural Criticism

Cultural Criticism

Author: Arthur Asa Berger

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780803957343

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Arthur Asa Berger's unique ability to translate difficult theories into accessible language makes this book an ideal introduction to cultural criticism. Berger covers the key theorists, concepts, and subject areas, from literary, sociological and psychoanalytical theories to semiotics and Marxism. Cultural Criticism breathes new life into the discipline by making these theories relevant to students' lives. The author illustrates his explanations with excerpts from classic works giving readers a sense of the important thinkers' styles and helping place them in their context. Berger also provides a comprehensive bibliography on cultural criticism for those who wish to explore the topics at greater length. Cultural Criticism is the perfect undergraduate supplemental text for such courses as media studies, literary criticism, and popular culture.


Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture

Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture

Author: Evan Kindley

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-09-18

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 0674981634

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The period between 1920 and 1950 saw an epochal shift in the American cultural economy. The shocks of the 1929 market crash and the Second World War decimated much of the support for high modernist literature, and writers who had relied on wealthy benefactors were forced to find new protectors from the depredations of the free market. Private foundations, universities, and government organizations began to fund the arts, and in this environment writers were increasingly obliged to become critics, elucidating and justifying their work to an audience of elite administrators. In Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, Evan Kindley recognizes the major role modernist poet-critics played in the transition from aristocratic patronage to technocratic cultural administration. Poet-critics developed extensive ties to a network of bureaucratic institutions and established dual artistic and intellectual identities to appeal to the kind of audiences and entities that might support their work. Kindley focuses on Anglo-American poet-critics including T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Sterling A. Brown, and R. P. Blackmur. These artists grappled with the task of being “village explainers” (as Gertrude Stein described Ezra Pound) and legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption. Modernism, Kindley shows, created a different form of labor for writers to perform and gave them an unprecedented say over the administration of contemporary culture. The consequences for our understanding of poetry and its place in our culture are still felt widely today.


Inside the Critics’ Circle

Inside the Critics’ Circle

Author: Phillipa K. Chong

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-09-14

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0691212503

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An inside look at the politics of book reviewing, from the assignment and writing of reviews to why critics think we should listen to what they have to say Taking readers behind the scenes in the world of fiction reviewing, Inside the Critics’ Circle explores the ways critics evaluate books despite the inherent subjectivity involved and the uncertainties of reviewing when seemingly anyone can be a reviewer. Drawing on interviews with critics from such venues as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post, Phillipa Chong delves into the complexities of the review-writing process, including the considerations, values, and cultural and personal anxieties that shape what critics do. Chong explores how critics are paired with review assignments, why they accept these time-consuming projects, how they view their own qualifications for reviewing certain books, and the criteria they employ when making literary judgments. She discovers that while their readers are of concern to reviewers, they are especially worried about authors on the receiving end of reviews. As these are most likely peers who will be returning similar favors in the future, critics’ fears and frustrations factor into their willingness or reluctance to write negative reviews. At a time when traditional review opportunities are dwindling while other forms of reviewing thrive, book reviewing as a professional practice is being brought into question. Inside the Critics’ Circle offers readers a revealing look into critics’ responses to these massive transitions and how, through their efforts, literary values get made.


Against Everything

Against Everything

Author: Mark Greif

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1101871156

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"These essays address such key topics in the cultural, political, and intellectual life of our time as the tyranny of exercise, the tyranny of nutrition and food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of Radiohead, the rise and fall of the hipster, the impact of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of life what might be the right philosophical stance to adopt toward one's self and the world." -- Amazon.com.


Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism

Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism

Author: Vincent B. Leitch

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0231079702

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Leitch argues for the use of poststructural theory in cultural criticism. He maintains that deconstruction remains crucial for a truly critical approach to cultural studies.


Homegrown

Homegrown

Author: bell hooks

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-13

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 1351757431

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In Homegrown, cultural critics bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains reflect on the innate solidarity between Black and Latino culture. Riffing on everything from home and family to multiculturalism and the mass media, hooks and Mesa-Bains invite readers to re-examine and confront the polarizing mainstream discourse about Black-Latino relationships that is too often negative in its emphasis on political splits between people of color. A work of activism through dialogue, Homegrown is a declaration of solidarity that rings true even ten years after its first publication. This new edition includes a new afterword, in which Mesa-Bains reflects on the changes, conflicts, and criticisms of the last decade.


The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism

The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism

Author: Joseph Childers

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780231072434

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More than 450 succinct entries from A to Z help readers make sense of the interdisciplinary knowledge of cultural criticism that includes film, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, poststructuralist, and postmodernist theory as well as philosophy, media studies, linguistics.


Secularization and Cultural Criticism

Secularization and Cultural Criticism

Author: Vincent P. Pecora

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2006-10

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0226653129

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'Secularization and Cultural Criticism' examines the responses of a wide range of thinkers to illustrate exactly why the problem of secularisation in the study of society and culture should matter once again.


Beloved Community

Beloved Community

Author: Casey Nelson Blake

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0807860425

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The "Young American" critics -- Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford -- are well known as central figures in the Greenwich Village "Little Renaissance" of the 1910s and in the postwar debates about American culture and politics. In Beloved Community, Casey Blake considers these intellectuals as a coherant group and assesses the connection between thier cultural criticisms and their attempts to forge a communitarian alternative to liberal and socialist poitics. Blake draws on biography to emphasize the intersection of questions of self, culture, and society in their calls for a culture of "personality" and "self-fulfillment." In contrast to the tendency of previous analyses to separate these critics' cultural and autobiographical writings from their politics, Blake argues that their cultural criticism grew out of a radical vision of self-realization through participation in a democratic culture and polity. He also examines the Young American writers' interpretations of such turn-of-the-century radicals as William Morris, Henry George, John Dewey, and Patrick Geddes and shows that this adversary tradition still offers important insights into contemporary issues in American politics and culture. Beloved Community reestablishes the democratic content of the Young Americans' ideal of "personality" and argues against viewing a monolithic therapeutic culture as the sole successor to a Victorian "culture of character." The politics of selfhood that was so critical to the Young Americans' project has remained a contested terrain throughout the twentieth century.