The result is an essential indecency; criticism is a practice in need of redemption by its practitioners.
The essential crisis of criticism isn't economic or practical, it's moral.
Of Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation," Acocella observes that Sontag's nonfiction performed the "essential function of criticism, that of introducing readers to new work, strange work, things they wouldn't ordinarily encounter — a duty no major critic had undertaken consistently since Edmund Wilson quit regular reviewing in the late '40s".
Not only did it serve what should be an essential function of criticism, that of introducing readers to new work, weird work, things they wouldn't ordinarily encounter — a duty no major critic had undertaken consistently since Edmund Wilson quit regular reviewing in the late forties — but, like Wilson's writings, it did so in a notably un-weird manner.
First, it is essential to welcome criticism at all times.
The great man or woman, Cavell holds, is required for rather than opposed to democracy: "essential to the criticism of democracy from within" (CHU, 3).
Despite their opposite positions in the Jewish-Christian debate (Crescas wrote one of the more philosophical anti-Christian works),[24] Crescas borrowed some of the major original philosophical opinions of Abner, including determinism, the difference between the attributes of the essence and the attributes that are essential, and the criticism of Aristotelian science.
At the end of his handbook Essentials Of Literary Criticism (1983, from which that is quoted), he maintains that "the training of a critic is also the training of a citizen".
"Criticism is essential," he explains, lightly chopping his hand on the amber desktop, as though he's dividing up territories.
Banter, that was all it was: criticism, the essential competitive relations of writers in New York — all of it was banter, engaged in by extremely witty wives of analysts at dinner parties.
