A cultural critic is a critic of a given culture, usually as a whole. Cultural criticism has significant overlap with social theory and cultural theory. While such criticism is simply part of the self-consciousness of the culture, the social positions of the critics and the medium they use vary widely. The conceptual and political grounding of criticism also changes over time.
Terminology
Contemporary usage has tended to include all types of
criticism directed at culture.
The term "cultural criticism" itself has been claimed by Jacques Barzun: No such thing was recognized or in favour when we i.e. began—more by intuition than design—in the autumn of 1934.[ Remembering Lionel Trilling, (1976), reprinted in The Jacques Barzun Reader (2002).][Casey Nelson Blake, a professor at Columbia University where Barzun and Trilling were, uses the term in the 1990 book title Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford.] It has been argued that in the inter-war period, the language of literary criticism was adequate for the needs of cultural critics; but that later it mainly served academe.
In contrast, a work such as Richard Wolin's 1995 The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (1995) uses it as a broad-brush description.
Victorian sages as critics
Cultural critics came to the scene in the nineteenth century.
Matthew Arnold[His much-cited Culture and Anarchy was subtitled An Essay in Political and Social Criticism.] and
Thomas Carlyle are leading examples of a cultural critic of the
Victorian age; in Arnold there is also a concern for religion.
John Ruskin was another. Because of an equation made between ugliness of material surroundings and an impoverished life,
and others might be considered implicitly to be engaging in cultural criticism, but the actual articulation is what makes a critic. In France, Charles Baudelaire was a cultural critic, as was Søren Kierkegaard in Denmark and Friedrich Nietzsche in Germany.
Twentieth century
In the twentieth century
Irving Babbitt on the right, and
Walter Benjamin[E.g. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (1994), series Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, 7.] on the left, might be considered major cultural critics. The field of play has changed considerably, in that the
humanities have broadened to include
cultural studies of all kinds, which are grounded in
critical theory. This trend is not without its dissidents, however; James Seaton has written extensively in defense of the continued importance of the Humanistic Tradition Irving Babbitt and his heirs championed, while criticizing the dominance of
critical theory in the teaching of literature. features a collection of essays from prominent English professors, writers and critics stating their disagreement with the prominent role given to critical theory in English departments.
Notable contemporary critics
See also
Notes
External links
