I've come to think that criticism is defined by the cultivation of a particular kind of self, one that has the right feelings and perceptions as well as the right thoughts and professional training and work-disciplines.
What are the consequences of this understanding of criticism?
Thoughts, others?
3 comments:
That's sort of the Lionel Trilling "moral obligation to be intelligent" sense of the intellectual, isn't it? Not so much a defining praxis as a particular kind of cultivation of the self.
I dunno. I tend towards the gramscian sense of the intellectual, but "the critic" as a particular form of intellectual might only be definable in the terms you describe.
I'm asking less about what our notion of criticism should be than about what it is.
n, i don't have my own response to your question, but i just read this essay and thought it might speak to what you are trying to get at re: the "metier" of the critic.
http://justtv.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/on-disliking-mad-men/
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