Download or read book The Critics Say written by Matt Windman and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-04-27 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What will happen to the theater when there are no more critics? With the decline of print media and the rise of online journalism, theater critics are facing hard times. As their influence fades, will the industry they cover be adversely affected or can bloggers and message boards fill the void? Can a new economic model be created for theater criticism? How can critics lucky enough to still have jobs stay relevant in the age of social media? Speaking of which, what does a theater critic really do, and how do you become one? In this book, Matt Windman, a theater critic himself, interviews more than 50 critics from New York and around the country, including Ben Brantley, Charles Isherwood, John Lahr, Terry Teachout, Linda Winer, Chris Jones, David Cote, John Simon and Peter Filichia. They discuss their long careers and the nightly process of evaluating plays and musicals, and offer their thoughts on the future of the profession.
Download or read book Inside the Critics Circle written by Phillipa K. Chong and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inside look at the politics of book reviewing, from the assignment and writing of reviews to why critics think we should listen to what they have to say Taking readers behind the scenes in the world of fiction reviewing, Inside the Critics’ Circle explores the ways critics evaluate books despite the inherent subjectivity involved and the uncertainties of reviewing when seemingly anyone can be a reviewer. Drawing on interviews with critics from such venues as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post, Phillipa Chong delves into the complexities of the review-writing process, including the considerations, values, and cultural and personal anxieties that shape what critics do. Chong explores how critics are paired with review assignments, why they accept these time-consuming projects, how they view their own qualifications for reviewing certain books, and the criteria they employ when making literary judgments. She discovers that while their readers are of concern to reviewers, they are especially worried about authors on the receiving end of reviews. As these are most likely peers who will be returning similar favors in the future, critics’ fears and frustrations factor into their willingness or reluctance to write negative reviews. At a time when traditional review opportunities are dwindling while other forms of reviewing thrive, book reviewing as a professional practice is being brought into question. Inside the Critics’ Circle offers readers a revealing look into critics’ responses to these massive transitions and how, through their efforts, literary values get made.
Download or read book The Critics Say written by Matt Windman and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-05-04 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What will happen to the theater when there are no more critics? With the decline of print media and the rise of online journalism, theater critics are facing hard times. As their influence fades, will the industry they cover be adversely affected or can bloggers and message boards fill the void? Can a new economic model be created for theater criticism? How can critics lucky enough to still have jobs stay relevant in the age of social media? Speaking of which, what does a theater critic really do, and how do you become one? In this book, Matt Windman, a theater critic himself, interviews more than 50 critics from New York and around the country, including Ben Brantley, Charles Isherwood, John Lahr, Terry Teachout, Linda Winer, Chris Jones, David Cote, John Simon and Peter Filichia. They discuss their long careers and the nightly process of evaluating plays and musicals, and offer their thoughts on the future of the profession.
Download or read book The Craft of Criticism written by Michael Kackman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-22 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions from 30 leading media scholars, this collection provides a comprehensive overview of the main methodologies of critical media studies. Chapters address various methods of textual analysis, as well as reception studies, policy, production studies, and contextual, multi-method approaches, like intertextuality and cultural geography. Film and television are at the heart of the collection, which also addresses emergent technologies and new research tools in such areas as software studies, gaming, and digital humanities. Each chapter includes an intellectual history of a particular method or approach, a discussion of why and how it was used to study a particular medium or media, relevant examples of influential work in the area, and an in-depth review of a case study drawn from the author's own research. Together, the chapters in this collection give media critics a complete toolbox of essential critical media studies methodologies.
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 The Limits of Critique written by Rita Felski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do critics feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What is the rationale for their conviction that language is always withholding some important truth, that the critic's task is to unearth what is unsaid, naturalized, or repressed? These are the features of critique, a mode of thought that thoroughly dominates academic criticism. In this book, Rita Felski brilliantly exposes critique's more troubling qualities and proposes alternatives to it. Critique, she argues, is not just a method but also a sensibility--one best captured by Paul Ricoeur's phrase "the hermeneutics of suspicion." As the characteristic affect of critique, suspicion, Felski shows, helps us understand critique's seductions and limitations. The questions that Felski poses about critique have implications well beyond intramural debates among literary scholars. Literary studies, says Felski, is facing a legitimation crisis thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves the field struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? For Felski, the tendencies to make literary texts the object of suspicious reading or, conversely, impute to them qualities of critique, forecloses too many other possibilities. Felski offers an alternative model that she calls "postcritical reading." Rather than looking behind the text for its hidden causes, conditions, and motives, she suggests that literary scholars place themselves in front of a text, reflecting on what it calls forth and makes possible. Here Felski enlists the work of Bruno Latour to rethink reading as a co-production between actors, rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking. As a scholar with an abiding respect for theory who has long deployed elements of critique in her own work, Felski is able to provide an insider's account of critique's limits and alternatives that will resonate widely in the humanities.
Download or read book The Moral Landscape written by Sam Harris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.
Download or read book To Rise Again at a Decent Hour written by Joshua Ferris and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this big, brilliant, profoundly observed novel by National Book Award Finalist Joshua Ferris explores the absurdities of modern life and one man's search for meaning. Paul O'Rourke is a man made of contradictions: he loves the world, but doesn't know how to live in it. He's a Luddite addicted to his iPhone, a dentist with a nicotine habit, a rabid Red Sox fan devastated by their victories, and an atheist not quite willing to let go of God. Then someone begins to impersonate Paul online, and he watches in horror as a website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account are created in his name. What begins as an outrageous violation of his privacy soon becomes something more soul-frightening: the possibility that the online "Paul" might be a better version of the real thing. As Paul's quest to learn why his identity has been stolen deepens, he is forced to confront his troubled past and his uncertain future in a life disturbingly split between the real and the virtual. At once laugh-out-loud funny about the absurdities of the modern world, and indelibly profound about the eternal questions of the meaning of life, love and truth, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a deeply moving and constantly surprising tour de force.
Download or read book Poet Critics and the Administration of Culture written by Evan Kindley and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period between 1920 and 1950 saw an epochal shift in the American cultural economy. The shocks of the 1929 market crash and the Second World War decimated much of the support for high modernist literature, and writers who had relied on wealthy benefactors were forced to find new protectors from the depredations of the free market. Private foundations, universities, and government organizations began to fund the arts, and in this environment writers were increasingly obliged to become critics, elucidating and justifying their work to an audience of elite administrators. In Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, Evan Kindley recognizes the major role modernist poet-critics played in the transition from aristocratic patronage to technocratic cultural administration. Poet-critics developed extensive ties to a network of bureaucratic institutions and established dual artistic and intellectual identities to appeal to the kind of audiences and entities that might support their work. Kindley focuses on Anglo-American poet-critics including T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Sterling A. Brown, and R. P. Blackmur. These artists grappled with the task of being “village explainers” (as Gertrude Stein described Ezra Pound) and legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption. Modernism, Kindley shows, created a different form of labor for writers to perform and gave them an unprecedented say over the administration of contemporary culture. The consequences for our understanding of poetry and its place in our culture are still felt widely today.
Download or read book Citizen Critics written by Rosa A. Eberly and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The condition of our public discussions about literary and cultural works has much to say about the condition of our democracy and the author argues for more public discourse--in classrooms, newspapers, magazines, etc. to reclaim a public voice on national artistic matters. In this revealing study of the links among literature, rhetoric, and democracy, Rosa A. Eberly explores the public debate generated by amateur and professional readers about four controversial literary works: two that were censored in the United States and two that created conflict because they were not censored. In Citizen Critics Eberly compares the outrage sparked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer with the relative quiescence that greeted the much more violent and sexually explicit content of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psychoand Andrea Dworkin's Mercy. Through a close reading of letters to the editor, reviews, media coverage, and court cases, Eberly shows how literary critics and legal experts defused censorship debates by shifting the focus from content to aesthetics and from social values to publicity. By asserting their authority to pass judgments--thus denying the authority of citizen critics--these professionals effectively removed the discussion from literary public spheres. A passionate advocate for treating reading as a public and rhetorical enterprise rather than solely as a private one, Eberly suggests the potential impact a work of literature may have on the social polity if it is brought into public forums for debate rather than removed to the exclusive rooms of literary criticism. Eberly urges educators to use their classrooms as protopublic spaces in which students can learn to make the transition from private reader to public citizen.
Download or read book Hillbilly Elegy written by J. D. Vance and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IS NOW A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD AND STARRING AMY ADAMS, GLENN CLOSE, AND GABRIEL BASSO "You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
Download or read book Critics Ratings and Society written by Grant Blank and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics, Ratings, and Society is the first comprehensive study of the review as social institution. Its theories and data encompass reviews of all types of products--including the arts (e.g. theater, books, and music) and consumer products (e.g. cars, software, and appliances). According to Blank, the core problem of reviews is credibility. Concerns about credibility organize the formulation of reviews and audiences. The connoisseurial-procedural distinction describes the production of credibility and its assessment under different types of rating systems.
Download or read book Underground written by Suelette Dreyfus and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2012-01-05 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suelette Dreyfus and her co-author, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, tell the extraordinary true story of the computer underground, and the bizarre lives and crimes of an elite ring of international hackers who took on the establishment. Spanning three continents and a decade of high level infiltration, they created chaos amongst some of the world's biggest and most powerful organisations, including NASA and the US military. Brilliant and obsessed, many of them found themselves addicted to hacking and phreaking. Some descended into drugs and madness, others ended up in jail. As riveting as the finest detective novel and meticulously researched, Underground follows the hackers through their crimes, their betrayals, the hunt, raids and investigations. It is a gripping tale of the digital underground.
Download or read book I Like to Watch written by Emily Nussbaum and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The big picture : how Buffy the vampire slayer turned me into a TV critic -- The long con ("The Sopranos") -- The great divide : Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the rise of the bad fan -- Difficult women ("Sex and the city") -- Cool story, bro ("True detective," "Top of the lake" and "The fall") -- Last girl in Larchmont : the legacy of Joan Rivers -- Girls girls girls : "Girls," "Vanderpump rules," "House of cards and Scandal," "The Amy Schumer show," "Transparent" -- Confessions of the human shield -- How jokes won the election -- In praise of sex and violence : "Hannibal," "Law et order : SVU," "Jessica Jones," -- "The jinx," "The Americans" -- The price is right : what advertising does to TV -- In living color : Kenya Barris' -- Breaking the box : "Jane the virgin," "The comeback," "The good wife," "The newsroom," "Adventure time," "The leftovers," "High maintenance." -- Riot girl : Jenji Kohan's hot provocations -- A disappointed fan is still a fan ("Lost") -- Mr. big : how Ryan Murphy became the most powerful man in television.
Download or read book The Recognitions written by William Gaddis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 969 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A postmodern masterpiece about fraud and forgery by one of the most distinctive, accomplished novelists of the last century. The Recognitions is a sweeping depiction of a world in which everything that anyone recognizes as beautiful or true or good emerges as anything but: our world. The book is a masquerade, moving from New England to New York to Madrid, from the art world to the underworld, but it centers on the story of Wyatt Gwyon, the son of a New England minister, who forsakes religion to devote himself to painting, only to despair of his inspiration. In expiation, he will paint nothing but flawless copies of his revered old masters—copies, however, that find their way into the hands of a sinister financial wizard by the name of Recktall Brown, who of course sells them as the real thing. Dismissed uncomprehendingly by reviewers on publication in 1955 and ignored by the literary world for decades after, The Recognitions is now established as one of the great American novels, immensely ambitious and entirely unique, a book of wild, Boschian inspiration and outrageous comedy that is also profoundly serious and sad.
Download or read book Citizenship in a Republic written by Theodore Roosevelt and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-29 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citizenship in a Republic is the title of a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt, former President of the United States, at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, on April 23, 1910. One notable passage from the speech is referred to as "The Man in the Arena": It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
Download or read book The Critics of Keynesian Economics written by Henry Hazlitt and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 1960 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
