"He really believed that literature was something that could be analyzed and criticized in ordinary language," Mr. Lears said in a telephone interview Monday.
The author of five feature films and several shorts, he uses a distinctive blend of fiction, documentary and essayistic speculation to analyze and criticize his country's complex national identity -- a crazy quilt of warring classes, ethnicities and economic zones.
"I do a mix, or change something, and I'm analyzed and criticized by everyone," he says, speaking from northern Spain where, he says only half-jokingly, he is "escaping the Beatlemaniacs".
Mr. Gordon's opinion might well be wrong, but he is the co-author of two books that analyze and criticize American military strategy in Iraq -- not just "Cobra II," but also "The Generals' War" -- and his opinion is quite consistent with the views he expressed, and The Times presumably encouraged him to express, in those two books.
Wittgenstein's attack on this viewpoint, which has come to be known as the "private language" argument, has been much discussed, partly because it was in this area that Wittgenstein presented what could most easily be identified as a more or less formal argument one that could then be analyzed and criticized in an analytic manner.
During a period of such enormous shifting, do we really want to lose our capacity to question, analyze and criticize?
The flow of Saudi petrodollars into the coffers of terrorist groups around the world has been reported on, analyzed and criticized for years, to little effect.
Reading in science education, they argue, involves learning how to comprehend, interpret, analyze, and criticize texts activities that are central to science.
