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We’re Called “Critics” For a Reason
Only saying you like things excludes you from the ranks of critics. It means you’re a glorified journalist.
Merriam Webster:
1 a : one who expresses a reasoned opinion on any matter especially involving a judgment of its value, truth, righteousness, beauty, or technique
b : one who engages often professionally in the analysis, evaluation, or appreciation of works of art or artistic performances
2: one given to harsh or captious judgment
Origin of CRITIC
Latin criticus, from Greek kritikos, from kritikos able to discern or judge, from krinein
First Known Use: 1588
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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The Rachel Shihor Interview
Graphs, Maps, Trees
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
Agreed, but dude, you’re stomping this point a lot.
@vfrancone Beacuse it’s necessary. Most of the published criticism are fluff pieces.
*Because
I think what’s missing from this debate is the observation that reducing it all to a choice between tough criticism and fluffy puff pieces creates an artificial duality. There are pieces of tough criticism that are incredibly shallow and stupid (as stupid as mindless praise), and there are pieces of criticism that gloriously celebrate the work that they explore. Criticism is neither good nor bad as a function of whether it damns or lauds — it is good or bad as a function of whether it aspires to say the essential in a beautiful way, regardless of what judgement it levels.
Exactly. The tone here is the tone of any half-intelligent political debate. Ideologies and binaries as opposed to dialogues towards goals.
Good criticism is criticism that tells you something core about what a work is doing, and how. Both a negative review and a positive review do that. (I think I let “review” slip in because that may be what we’re really all talking about in the first place.)
And can’t the call be for unabashed, unflinching honesty, whether that be “positive” or “negative”?
@Arturo: I realize this, but this is Scott’s umpteenth post on the subject. And again I agree with him, but after a while the discussion of what makes a critic and who deserves to be called one, lacking “dialogues toward goals” as P.T. Smith mentioned, makes those screaming “I am a critic; this person is not” sound a bit desperate, arrogant, and even callow. Worse, they begin to resemble the academics who denounce creative criticism.
There may be an influx of quasi-criticism in our 21st century, sure, but good, informed readers surely can see the difference between a critical essay and a fluff piece. They always have and they always will.
That being said, keep up the great work, Scott.
Critics, man. Critics never got nothing nice to say. You know the one thing I notice about critics, man? Is critics never ask me how my day went.
Jerks.