Download or read book Sontag and Kael written by Craig Seligman and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2005-06-08 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A witty and stylish assessment of the work of two icons of cultural criticism: Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael. Though outwardly they had some things in common--they were both Westerners who came east, both schooled in philosophy, both secular Jews and both single mothers--they were polar opposites in temperament and approach. Seligman approaches both women through their widely discussed work. Kael practiced a kind of verbal jazz--exuberant, excessive, intimate, emotional and funny. Sontag is formal and rather icy. From the beginning it's clear where Seligman's sympathies lie: Sontag is a critic he reveres; but Kael is a critic he loves. But for all his reservations about Sontag, he considers both writers magnificent and his exploration of their differences results in this luminously written landmark of criticism.
Download or read book Sontag and Kael written by Craig Seligman and published by Counterpoint. This book was released on 2004-05-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fans of high culture, pop culture and American genius, a personal and idiosyncratic exploration of two of the 20th century's most distinguished cultural icons. With wit and style worthy of his subjects, Craig Seligman explores the enduring influence of two critics who defined the cultural sensibilities of a generation: Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael. Though outwardly they had several things in common--they were both Westerners who came east, both schooled in philosophy, both secular Jews, and both single mothers--they were polar opposites in temperament and approach. From the very beginning Seligman makes his sympathies clear: Sontag is a writer he reveres; but Kael is a writer he loves.He approaches both critics through their work, whose fundamental parallels serve to sharpen their differences. Tone is the most obvious area where they're at odds. Kael practiced a kind of verbal jazz, exuberant, excessive, intimate, emotional, and funny. Sontag is formal and a little icy--a model of detachment. Kael never changed her approach from her first review to her last, while mutability has been one of the defining motifs of Sontag's career. Moral questions obsess Sontag; they interested
Download or read book Sharp written by Michelle Dean and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “deeply researched and uncommonly engrossing” book profiling ten trailblazing literary women, including Dorothy Parker and Joan Didion (Paris Review). In Sharp, Michelle Dean explores the lives of ten women of vastly different backgrounds and points of view who all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America. These women—Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm—are united by what Dean calls “sharpness,” the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit. Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books. It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing despite the extreme condescension of the male-dominated cultural establishment. Mixing biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp is a celebration of this group of extraordinary women, an engaging introduction to their works, and a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps, change the world.
Download or read book Where the Stress Falls written by Susan Sontag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2002-11-09 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Sontag has said that her earliest idea of what a writer should be was "someone who is interested in everything." Thirty-five years after her first collection of essays, the now classic Against Interpretation, our most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last two decades that illustrate a deeply felt, kaleidoscopic array of interests, passions, observations, and ideas. "Reading" offers ardent, freewheeling considerations of talismanic writers from her own private canon, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Randall Jarrell, Roland Barthes, Machado de Assis, W. G. Sebald, Borges, and Elizabeth Hardwick. "Seeing" is a series of luminous and incisive encounters with film, dance, photography, painting, opera, and theatre. And in the final section, "There and Here," Sontag explores some of her own commitments: to the work (and activism) of conscience, to the concreteness of historical understanding, and to the vocation of the writer. Where the Stress Falls records a great American writer's urgent engagement with some of the most significant aesthetic and moral issues of the late twentieth century, and provides a brilliant and clear-eyed appraisal of what is at stake, in this new century, in the survival of that inheritance.
Download or read book The Age of Movies Selected Writings of Pauline Kael written by Pauline Kael and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 1186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A master film critic is at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best in this career-spanning collection featuring pieces on Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, and other modern movie classics “Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply,” Pauline Kael once observed, “just because you must use everything you are and everything you know.” Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker, Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes of a generation. She had a gift for capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor’s gesture or the full implication of a cinematic image. Kael called movies “the most total and encompassing art form we have,” and her reviews became a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace. Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist—an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman—or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry. Here are her appraisals of era-defining films such as Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde, The Leopard, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Nashville, along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery—all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page.
Download or read book Reborn written by Susan Sontag and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents excerpts from the early writings of the author, with reflections on her meetings with influential writers and intellectuals, her literary ambitions, and her criticisms of other writers.
Download or read book Critical Mass written by James Wolcott and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Wolcott’s career as a critic has been unmatched, from his early Seventies dispatches for The Village Voice to the literary coverage made him equally feared and famous to his must-read reports on the cultural weather for Vanity Fair. Bringing together his best work from across the decades, this collection shows Wolcott as connoisseur, intrepid reporter, memoirist, and necessary naysayer. We begin with “O.K. Corral Revisited,” Wolcott’s career-launching account of the famed Norman Mailer–Gore Vidal dust-off on the original Dick Cavett Show. He goes on to consider (or reconsider) the towering figures of our culture, among them Lena Dunham Patti Smith, Johnny Carson, Woody Allen, and John Cheever. And we witness his legendary takedowns, which have entered into the literary lore of our time. In an age where a great deal of back scratching and softball pitching pass for criticism, Critical Mass offers a bracing taste of the real thing.
Download or read book Better Living Through Criticism written by A. O. Scott and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Scott shows that while individual critics--himself included--can make mistakes and find flaws where they shouldn't, criticism as a discipline is one of the noblest, most creative, and urgent activities of modern existence. Using his own film criticism as a starting point--everything from his infamous dismissal of the international blockbuster The Avengers to his intense affection for Pixar's animated Ratatouille--Scott expands outward, easily guiding readers through the complexities of Rilke and Shelley, the origins of Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, the power of Marina Abramovich and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' Drawing on the long tradition of criticism from Aristotle to Susan Sontag, Scott shows that real criticism was and always will be the breath of fresh air that allows true creativity to thrive. "The time for criticism is always now," Scott explains, "because the imperative to think clearly, to insist on the necessary balance of reason and passion, never goes away."
Download or read book Trip to Hanoi written by Susan Sontag and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In May of 1968, Susan Sontag visited Hanoi. The report of her trip is neither a political treatise nor a travelogue, but a sensitive observer's response to a world totally foreign to the Western mind. During her trip, Susan Sontag discovered her preconception of North Vietnam and it's people had little relevance to the actual situation. By reassessing her own point of view, Miss Sontag creates a startling picture of life in Hanoi"--Page 4 of cover
Download or read book Under the Sign of Saturn written by Susan Sontag and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-05-16 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Sontag's third essay collection brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980. In these provocative and hugely influential works she explores some of the most controversial artists and thinkers of our time, including her now-famous polemic against Hitler's favourite film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, and the cult of fascist art, as well as a dazzling analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany. There are also highly personal and powerful explorations of death, art, language, history, the imagination and writing itself.
Download or read book The Free World written by Louis Menand and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." —Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post "The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." —David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' Choice One of The New York Times's 100 best books of 2021 | One of The Washington Post's 50 best nonfiction books of 2021 | A Mother Jones best book of 2021 In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.
Download or read book Ecstasy and Terror written by Daniel Mendelsohn and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The role of the critic,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way.” His latest collection exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made him “required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” (The Daily Beast). In Ecstasy and Terror, Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways. Many of these essays look with fresh eyes at our culture’s Greek and Roman models: some find an arresting modernity in canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a “Greek DNA” in our responses to national traumas such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. There are pieces on contemporary literature, from the “aesthetics of victimhood” in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth, Ingmar Bergman, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Mendelsohn considers pop culture, too, in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligence—a subject, he reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer. This collection also brings together for the first time a number of the award-winning memoirist’s personal essays, including his “critic’s manifesto” and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics.
Download or read book Notes on Sontag written by Phillip Lopate and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-09 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the "foremost interpreters of . . . our recent contemporary moment." Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years. Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.
Download or read book Lucking Out written by James Wolcott and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our most admired (and feared) cultural critics, a memoir that captures all the gritty, grubby glamour of New York in the awful/wonderful Seventies. In the autumn of 1972, a very young and green James Wolcott arrived in New York from Maryland, full of literary dreams, equipped with a letter of introduction from Norman Mailer, and having no idea what was about to hit him. Landing at a time of accelerating municipal squalor and, paradoxically, gathering cultural energy in all spheres as "Downtown" became a category of art and life unto itself, he embarked upon his sentimental education, seventies New York style. This portrait of a critic as a young man is also a rollicking, acutely observant portrait of a legendary time and place. Mixing grit and glitter in just the right proportions, suffused with affection for the talented and sometimes half-crazed denizens of the scene, it will make readers long for a time when you really could get mugged around here.
Download or read book The Cruel Radiance written by Susie Linfield and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susie Linfield addresses the issue of whether photographs depicting past scenes of violence & cruelty are voyeuristic, arguing that if we do not look & understand that we are seeing at people, rather than depersonalised acts of inhumanity, our hopes of curbing political violence today are probably limited.
Download or read book The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic written by Jessica Hopper and published by Featherproof Books. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jessica Hopper's music criticism has earned her a reputation as a firebrand, a keen observer and fearless critic not just of music but the culture around it. With this volume spanning from her punk fanzine roots to her landmark piece on R. Kelly's past, The First Collection leaves no doubt why The New York Times has called Hopper's work "influential." Not merely a selection of two decades of Hopper's most engaging, thoughtful, and humorous writing, this book documents the last 20 years of American music making and the shifting landscape of music consumption. The book journeys through the truths of Riot Grrrl's empowering insurgence, decamps to Gary, IN, on the eve of Michael Jackson's death, explodes the grunge-era mythologies of Nirvana and Courtney Love, and examines emo's rise. Through this vast range of album reviews, essays, columns, interviews, and oral histories, Hopper chronicles what it is to be truly obsessed with music. The pieces in The First Collection send us digging deep into our record collections, searching to re-hear what we loved and hated, makes us reconsider the art, trash, and politics Hopper illuminates, helping us to make sense of what matters to us most.
Download or read book A Redemptive Path Forward written by Antong Lucky and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A motivational memoir by a formerly incarcerated man who transformed from founder and leader of the Dallas Bloods to a practitioner of peace and nonviolence in the neighborhood he once helped destroy As a child of an incarcerated father, Antong Lucky grew up in an impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhood in East Dallas, Texas, born at the same time as East Dallas experienced an alarming rise in crack cocaine and heroin use. Despite his high grades and passion for learning, Antong is introduced to gang life and its consequences. Eventually, Antong forms the Dallas Bloods gang, inaugurating a period in the 1990s of escalating retaliatory gun violence buoyed by a lucrative illegal drug enterprise until he is ultimately arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison. His journey through the doors of transformation came through the pain of incarceration and introspection that caused him to question the cognitive distortions embedded in him since childhood. Once in prison, Antong denounced his gang affiliation and began working to unite rival gangs, quickly rising to become one of the most respected and sought-after mentors in prison. A spiritual transformation further inspired Antong to return to his old neighborhood after early release, seeking to align with like-minded people dedicated to challenging systemic issues in U.S. communities through collective efforts. The work of an incisive, determined mind, A Redemptive Path Forward will take its place among the broadening canon of titles championing and investigating prison reform and societal transformation.
