MetaFilter posts tagged with criticism

Satire as Journalism

filthy light thief — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:51:40 -0800

Satire has long been part of discourse, with written records going back to the Ramesside Period of Ancient Egypt, and two primary classifications of satire originate with the Roman satirists Horace and Juvenal. Other notable historic figures have also been authors of significant satire, but not always with much appreciation. News satire furthers the awkward stance with public, as the public may read satire as an outrageous truth, and be angered instead of amused. The Daily Show, and Jon Stewart in specific, ranks well in the fractured world of current news programming, and the show was noted in the New York Times as "a genuine cultural and political force" (previously), but you don't have take their word for it. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism studied the content of The Daily Show for an entire year (2007), providing interesting (if slightly dated) details on the show. That year included their much-viewed coverage fo the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. And in poll results published July 24, 2009, Jon Stewart was voted America's most trusted newscaster, apparently filling the position previously held by Walter Cronkite. But is it because Stewart is one of the few journalists willing to ask the hard questions or has America been won over by "cheap laughs"?

The Life and Times of Fuzzy Dunlop

Abiezer — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:02:12 -0800

The Wire Files Open-access online journal darkmatter, "producing contemporary postcolonial critique," devoted its fourth issue to the television drama The Wire. An editorial explains that the "special issue aims to examine the place of race in the complex formation of the series." Thirteen articles cover The Wire's political economy, subversion of heteronormative assumptions, racial codes, Herc as a Zelig-like nexus, Baudrillardian urban space and much more in a veritable smorgasbord of academic bean-plating.

I'll do it as long as someone will publish it for me

Potomac Avenue — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:46:17 -0800

Greil Marcus writes Real Life Top Ten for the Believer Magazine, in which he lists "anything that remotely has to do with music, a dress Bette Midler wore at an awards show or a great guitar solo in the middle of a song that otherwise wasn't very interesting." But he's been writing this column online for just about 10 years. Not to mention the previous incarnation in Artfourm, some collected at Bnet. Not to mention that he started writing the lists in 1978: "The point was not to just be a list of records, but anything that remotely had to do with music, a dress Bette Midler wore at an awards show or a great guitar solo in the middle of a song that otherwise wasn't very interesting. At some point, Doug Simmons, the music editor at The Village Voice, said, "What if you made that into a real column, annotated each item?" I'd never thought of that. So I made it a monthly column for The Village Voice in around '86.... It's not a central focus, but it's a kind of organizing principle. I do it for fun. It keeps me looking, keeps me listening, keeps me alert. " Powells interview. "If I have an argument to make for the Top Ten, it's that you can find culture everywhere. Culture is always at work, it's always changing or manipulating or exploiting our perceptions and prejudices--what we want and what we're afraid of--and you can find very smart, dedicated people working on those premises in shopwindows, in advertisements, in painting and sculpture, in records, in performances. It's like being at an amusement park with these incredible surprises happening all the time. That's the sensibility, I suppose, that this column invoked when I was doing it as I should have." Artforum 2003 Greil's most recent book is "The Shape Of Things to Come" (video excerpt). Previously

The influence of Edmund Spenser across two and a half centuries as traced through 25000 different texts

Kattullus — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:54:47 -0800

Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry 1579-1830 is a mammoth database of English poetry and other writings that traces the influence of the great 16th-Century poet Edmund Spenser on English poetry across 250 years. There are roughly 25000 different texts on the site, over 6000 poems from famous classics to obscure ephemera, and further thousands of biographies and commentaries. Since it would take years to read all the material I am happy to say that there is a guide to navigating the database, an overview of its contents, a statistical summary and an essay on tradition and innovation. The immense database, which started life as a pile of index cards, was compiled largely by Virginia Tech Professor David Hill Radcliffe over the course of 17 years.

The Word-Stormer

HumanComplex — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:07:21 -0800

John Banville's most recent essay on Samuel Beckett: The Word-Stormer. Banville has previously written insightful essays thinly disguised as book reviews on The Painful Comedy of Samuel Beckett, the influence of painting on Beckett's writing, and Beckett on the couch.

I know what's wrong and that's good.

Brandon Blatcher — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:46:50 -0800

"...criticism, for lack of a better word, is good. Criticism is right. Criticism works. Criticism clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit…

A Postgraduate Year at Rushmore Academy

Horace Rumpole — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:37:13 -0800

Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style. A video essay in five parts by Matt Zoller Seitz. (Links go to the text of the essay; click on the embedded video to view.) [via]

"R, and G, and B", a well-curated (and seemingly undiscovered) film blog

colinmarshall — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 09:58:31 -0800

"R, and G, and B" is a very well-curated — and, seemingly as yet undiscovered — film review blog by the video artist Blake Williams covering pictures by filmmakers like Werner Herzog, Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Carl Dreyer, Michael Haneke, Stanley Kubrick and, best of all, Abbas Kiarostami.

Your Favorite X Sucks. Or Not.

Navelgazer — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:06:16 -0800

Pop Culture Blind Spots, Guilty Pleasures, Guilty Displeasures and Sacred Cows from The A.V. Club

Some articles about Blade Runner

nthdegx — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:17:55 -0800

Some articles about Blade Runner

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

zoomorphic — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:09:20 -0800

"We could all do worse than to write like Saul Bellow. And when I say write like Saul Bellow, I mean be Saul Bellow. And when I say be Saul Bellow, I mean unzip the skin from his body and wear it as a sort of Saul Bellow suit so that we can get cozy in it and truly inhabit it and understand the Old Macher." Writer Colson Whitehead parodies formidable literary critic James Wood and his 2008 treatise, How Fiction Works. At this point in his increasingly controversial scholarship, Mr. Wood is probably used to such cheek from those kids writing books on his lawn. James Wood has applauded the study of literature as an ageless aesthetic rather than a reflection on contemporary culture, fractured selfhood, and globalization--a view cherished by older critics like Harold Bloom and lately eschewed by the 43-year old Harvard professor's newfangled contemporaries. Wood's hidebound distaste for identity politics marks a schism between late modernism and post-modernism, a rift best viewed from above in this infamous review of Zadie Smith's Booker Prize-winning White Teeth. Lamenting the new face of literature that revels in confusion, distortion, paranoia, and so-called hysterical realism, Wood not only wagged his finger at Smith, but also took literary giants Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace to task for tampering with the novel's "delicate structure." Smith responded to Wood's eulogy for the novel with characteristically wry idiom: "The novel is not an immutable fact of human artistic life, after all, just a historically specific phenomenon that came and will go unless there are writers who have the heart, the brain and, crucially, the cojones to keep it alive." For now, Wood reigns comfortably as one of the most daunting critics of literature in English, even enjoying a few tentative fans from the under-40 crowd. But the success of writers like Colson Whitehead, a 31-year old, African-American, Pulitzer Prize-candidate who lists a Run DMC song as an "important plot point" in his upcoming novel Sag Harbor, marks yet one more step in literature's shift from the 20th century to the 21st.

Critics justify their existence.

minifigs — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 05:08:31 -0800

Squarepusher takes on the Guardian's pop critics.

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

KokuRyu — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:23:36 -0800

Friedman under attack More than 100 faculty at the University of Chicago, where Milton Friedman won the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics, are trying to stop the university from putting Mr. Friedman's name on a $200-million (U.S.) research centre. The opponents argue that the Milton Friedman Institute would compromise the academic integrity of the university and serve as a monument to Mr. Friedman's world outlook, which they say has largely been discredited. Supporters say it's unfair to use today's economic troubles to tarnish Mr. Friedman or scrap the project. They have organized a counterpetition and set up websites, including Friedmanfacts.com, to challenge opponents.

Next, run with scissors.

prefpara — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:49:26 -0800

Judge a book by its cover. See if you can guess the Amazon rating.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption

Navelgazer — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:46:29 -0800

The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a writer would like to be able to say and what he actually knows how to say. It is easy to fake; brutality is not strength, flipness is not wit, edge-of-the-chair writing can be as boring as flat writing; dalliance with promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff when described by goaty young men with no other purpose in mind than to describe dalliance with promiscuous blondes. There has been so much of this sort of thing that if a character in a detective story says, "Yeah," the author is automatically a Hammett imitator. Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder" (1950)

The New Shock

chuckdarwin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:27:18 -0800

Art critic Robert Hughes and The Mona Lisa Curse

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that videogames are created awesome.

empath — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:41:18 -0800

The Actionbutton.net Manifesto: The 25 Best Games of All Time. An eclectic list of awesome, and sometimes obscure games, accompanied by impassioned, long-winded, often pretentious and sometimes insightful essays/reviews. Bonus quasi-related link: 1UP chats(warning: 43mb mp3 file) with Rod Humble (The Sims/The Marriage), Jonathan Blow and David Hellman (Braid) about game design, post-modern literature and lots of other stuff. I linked those guys in a previous Braid post, but this is a really good interview that seems to sum up a lot of what's going on in the games industry, and they answer a lot of criticisms.

Hey, That's Mine!

Paid In Full — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:19:36 -0800

Dude, You Stole My Article They say everyone's a critic, but in this case, the critic is everyone. Today in Slate, Jody Rosen uncovers what just might be "in purely statistical terms ... the greatest plagiarism scandal in the annals of American journalism". ~~Via~~ Stolen from Zoilus.

sinuosity

plexi — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 08:46:27 -0800

Realist Fiction by George Saunders:
"Last night, in a biker bar, I overheard two men discussing what distinguished “realist” fiction from more “experimental” work. Although one shouldn’t generalize, I never expect bikers to be literary critics. Well, these were literary critics, and good ones—in fact, they’d bought their “hogs” with royalties from a book they’d co-written, Feminine Desire In Jane Austen."

Experimental Fiction by George Saunders:
"Experimental fiction is the art of telling a story in which certain aspects of reality have been exaggerated or distorted in such a way as to put the reader off the story and make him go watch a television show."

Anger can make a man verbose

MrMerlot — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:15:13 -0800

Giles Coren is restaurant critic at the Times (of London). Last week he wrote a very angry letter to the subeditors complaining that they were "tinkering with his copy". The subs were guilty of deleting a single indefinite article. Coren wrote: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh." It appeared as: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh." Apart from working as a restaurant critic, Coren (previously here and here) is also a satirist. I've done some checking and apparently he is not making this up.

Everything should be subject to critical analysis.

kldickson — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:41:48 -0800

Via The Friendly Atheist and the New York Times, this blog post and this article explain two instances of a very, very unsettling new phenomenon. A frightening new era of political correctness - about religions - erupts on college campuses, to the dismay of those who value academic discourse, academic freedom, and critical analysis.

Thumbs down. No stars.

crossoverman — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:44:13 -0800

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Movies by Armond White. Premiere.com critic and cineaste blogger, Glenn Kenny responds. Movie reviewers across America lose their jobs. Hachette Filipacchi follows suit at Premiere.com. Kenny blogs about The End of an Era - having written reviews for the site and the previously cancelled Premiere magazine for nearly fifteen years.

Shakespeare and philosophy

painquale — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:38:38 -0800

Martha Nussbaum reviews three recent books on Shakespeare and philosophy. The essay offers an excellent analysis of love in Antony and Cleopatra and Othello, and an excellent discussion of the interaction between philosophy and literature. From the essay: "To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher's study of Shakespeare should do three things. First and most centrally, it should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle--rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101. A philosopher reading Shakespeare should wonder, and ponder, in a genuinely philosophical way. Second, it should illuminate the world of the plays, attending closely enough to language and to texture that the interpretation changes the way we see the work, rather than just uses the work as grist for some argumentative mill. And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare's plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what?" There is some discussion of the piece here.

Trying to rape the viewer into independence

chuckdarwin — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:56:04 -0800

17 Notorious Living, Working Cinematic Provocateurs. The Onion A/V Club strikes again.

Getting It All Wrong: Bioculture critiques Cultural Critique

jason's_planet — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:26:57 -0800

Bioculture critiques Cultural Critique Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual advances of our time.