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?
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleten, 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.
ReplyDeletehttp://justtv.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/on-disliking-mad-men/