The critic and her public are difficult concepts to define or fix. The critic is not a creative writer, an academic, a journalist, or a reporter, yet criticism borrows from the protocols of all four professions. The critic's publics are not made up exclusively of scholars, specialists, artists, or lay readers, but span these divisions. The aim of this course is to trace the evolution of the critic, her function, her style, and her publics from the seventeenth century to the present. Readings will include essays by Jane Anger, Margaret Cavendish, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Eliza Haywood, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, José Ortega y Gasset, Jorge Luis Borges, Clement Greenberg, James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, Edward Said, Toni Morrison, Renata Adler, Michael Warner, Anne Carson, Margo Jefferson, and Elif Batuman. The class will be linked with the Shapiro Center talk series, "The Critic and Her Publics," and the Shapiro Center Master Classes. |