Authority
Essays
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Many worry that criticism is suffering from a crisis of authority. In a world where everyone’s a critic, what is criticism for? Since her canonical essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a leading public intellectual and a bold cartographer of the new landscape of taste itself.
Authority brings together sharp, illuminating essays on everything from musical theater to sci-fi novels, as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of personal essays first published in the magazine n+1. Throughout, Chu defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, charging fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with complacent humanism and modeling how the left might brave the culture wars with both its faculty of judgment and its sense of justice intact.
In two magisterial new essays, Chu offers a fresh intellectual history of criticism’s crisis of authority, tracing the surprisingly political contours of the discipline from its origins in the Enlightenment to our present age of social media. The desire to recover some lost authority, she argues, is neither new nor particularly freeing. Rather than being taken in by an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies over the state of our culture, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the actual crises, from climate change to rising authoritarianism, that confront us today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This brilliant collection from Chu (Females) showcases the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic's reflections on literature, television, and the art of criticism. Reviewing novels by some of contemporary literature's biggest names, Chu dismisses Hanya Yanagihara's To Paradise as a "book in which horrible things happen to people for no reason," and argues that the off-putting characters in Ottessa Moshfegh's Lapvona illustrate how "disgust does not preclude delight—and, in fact, it often enhances it." In "Bad TV," Chu offers a nuanced take on how such "woke" shows as Master of None and Transparent blurred the lines between politics and entertainment in such a way that by the time the #MeToo movement arrived, it was received like a TV show, complete with complaints about "believability." The two strongest essays reckon with the role of critics. In the thought-provoking "Criticism in a Crisis," Chu argues that critics must bring a clear-eyed understanding of their own politics and values to elucidating the moral meaning of the art they interpret. The eponymous essay explores how throughout history, critics and ruling classes have appealed to similar sources (tradition and religion during the Middle Ages; rationality and law during the Enlightenment) to legitimate their authority. Intellectually rigorous and lucidly argued, this affirms Chu's status as one of the most incisive critics working today.
