Cultural critic
A cultural critic is a critic of a given culture, usually as a whole and typically on a radical basis. There is significant overlap with social criticism and social philosophers.
Terminology
Contemporary usage has tended to include all types of criticism directed at culture.
The term cultural criticism itself has been claimed by Jacques Barzun: No such thing was recognized or in favour when we [i.e. Barzun and Trilling] began — more by intuition than design — in the autumn of 1934.[1][2] In contrast, a work such as Richard Wolin's 1995 The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (1995) uses it as a broad-brush description.
Victorian sages as critics
Cultural critics came to the scene in the nineteenth century. Matthew Arnold[3] and Thomas Carlyle are leading examples of a cultural critic of the Victorian age; in Arnold there is also a concern for religion. John Ruskin was another. Because of an equation made between ugliness of material surroundings and an impoverished life, aesthetes and others might be considered implicitly to be engaging in cultural criticism, but the actual articulation is what makes a critic. In France, Charles Baudelaire was a cultural critic, as was Friedrich Nietzsche in Germany.
Twentieth century
In the twentieth century Irving Babbitt on the right, and Walter Benjamin[4] on the left, might be considered major cultural critics. The field of play has changed considerably, in that the humanities have broadened to include cultural studies of all kinds. A cultural critic might still be distinguished by being firmly judgmental, rather than concentrating on the role of objective scholar.
Examples of contemporary usage
See also
Notes
- ^ Remembering Lionel Trilling, (1976), reprinted in The Jacques Barzun Reader (2002).
- ^ Casey Nelson Blake, a professor at Columbia University where Barzun and Trilling were, uses the term in the 1990 book title Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford.
- ^ His much-cited Culture and Anarchy was subtitled An Essay in Political and Social Criticism.
- ^ E.g. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (1994), series Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, 7.
- ^ A Cultural Critic Answers His Own
- ^ Scholar, cultural critic Gates to give Kent Lecture
- ^ Self-description [1].
- ^ Recently I was introduced to an audience as a cultural critic, and I think this probably says it best. .