The first modern novel was already a product, even an expression, of negative criticism: "Don Quixote" contains a quite explicit critique of the chivalric romance and its insufficiency to account for the way real life feels when you get up in the morning in 17th-century Spain.
In fact, Wittgenstein implicitly rejected the imagery theory of meaning even in his early work – the so called "picture theory of meaning" of the Tractatus (Wittgenstein, 1922) is not a version of the imagery theory – but an explicit critique appears only in his posthumously published later writings (although the arguments were already influential during his lifetime, long before they saw print).
Berger's comedy is impressionistic, conjuring up a mood, rather than offering an explicit critique.
The most explicit critique of the conflict comes from Shields (David Ganly), a former republican volunteer, disillusioned now that the violence has become all too real and civilians are suffering the most.
Whether Putnam's early realism was ever "metaphysical" in this sense is questionable, but it is clear that his explicit critique of metaphysical realism gives Putnam's philosophy a Kantian bent; this is particularly salient in the papers collected in Reason, Truth and History (1981).
Despite Marx's stress on critique of capitalism and discussion of the new communist society that should replace it, his explicit critique of capitalism is guarded, as he saw it as an improved society compared to the past ones (slavery and feudal).
"At the heart of the script, the work, the performances all of it is more or less explicit critique of the tacit violence that might be inflicted by various technologies in their mediation of humans, their identities, etc".
A manifest affiliation with noir traditions which, by its nature, allows different sorts of commentary on them to be inferred can also provide the basis for explicit critiques of those traditions.
Having been taught in high school to read literary texts according to principles derived from the New Criticism — close reading, dissection of metaphor and symbol — it was shocking and exhilarating to discover Millett's audacious coupling of an explicit political critique with a technically skilled literary dissection.
