Two Words, One Answer.
after criticism
 After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (New Interventions in Art History) $41.95 It has recently become apparent that criticism is in trouble. Either commodification is deemed to have killed it off, or it has become institutionally routine. This book explores contemporary approaches that have sought to renew criticism's energies in the wake of a theatrical turn in recent visual arts practice and the emergence of a performative arts writing over the past decade or so. Issues addressed include the performing of art's histories; the consequences for criticism of embracing boredom, distraction, and other "queer" forms of (in)attention; and the importance of exploring writerly process in responding to aesthetic experience. Bringing together newly commissioned work from the fields of art history, performance studies, and visual culture with the writings of contemporary artists, After Criticism provides a set of experimental essays that demonstrate how the critical might live on as a vital and efficacious force within contemporary culture.  After the New Criticism $28.00 What "a reader" said, and then some. Lentricchia famously renounced Theory and all its devices in a "Lingua Franca" essay, but the seeds of that repentance were already evident in "After the New Criticism," a case study in ressentiment. The book is interesting (hence 2 stars not 1), not for what it says about Bloom or de Man, but for the fact of its being so widely received as a vade mecum to lit theory. But for heaven's sake, if you want to know what de Man thought, read "The Resistance to Theory" (the essay not the book), or something else BY the man. |
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