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• Why cultural criticism matters

Cultural criticism is journalism. And in an era when fewer outlets support it, we need more of it, not less

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I’ve been thinking about The Hateful Eight a lot lately.

There’s no real good reason for this, except that the movie, which came out in 2015 and is Quentin Tarantino’s most recent film, takes place in a kind of miserable, snow-covered hell, making it one of those non-Christmas films that still feels most appropriate to break out at the end of the year.

The movie was one of Tarantino’s lowest earners at the box office, and it hasn’t had the long tail that many of his other films have enjoyed in the cultural conversation. If Tarantino has ever made a movie that’s been largely forgotten, it’s The Hateful Eight .

And yet I can’t seem to shake it, over three years after I first saw it.

I didn’t think much of the movie at the time . Filmed largely on one set, where eight characters gab and gab and gab at each other until the bloodshed begins, the nearly three-hour film is an endless series of provocations by Tarantino that toy with big dividing lines around race, class, and especially gender in America, without tipping its cap toward what it really thinks.

It’s a nasty, ugly movie, and it’s all but impossible to tell if Tarantino is reveling in that nastiness and ugliness (which he does from time to time, as in his 2007 movie Death Proof ) or depicting it so that we might reflect on our own nastiness and ugliness (which he did in his 2012 movie Django Unchained , whose core goal seems to be forcing white Americans to confront their ancestors’ role in the institution of slavery).

The Hateful Eight is just mean , and it feels like the work of someone who looked around at America and concluded that it was a land full of angry, spiteful people who would be more willing to burn their own lives to the ground than admit either their own sins or the sins of their country. It’s an apocalyptic story, even though it’s set in the Old West, about a country trapped in a cabin with itself and tilting toward murder.

In 2015, it played like Tarantino sticking his tongue out at you from the movie screen. But in 2018, it plays like a prophecy I missed at the time.

The two years since the 2016 election have been disastrous for the continued employment of cultural critics and journalists

The last two years have not been particularly great for cultural criticism and culture writing more generally. The twin pressures of a political situation that has a tendency to gobble up all available media oxygen and the increased centrality of review aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (to the degree that movie studios routinely blame bad Rotten Tomatoes scores for their box office failures) have pushed more and more media companies to cut back on culture writing.

Often, these cuts have come to pass through the outright downsizing of culture-writing staffs. Buzzfeed dismissed four culture writers and editors in late 2017 (though it still employs the terrific critic Alison Willmore) and its culture-oriented podcast team in 2018. In July 2018, many staff members of The A.V. Club, perhaps the internet’s longest-running outlet focused solely on pop culture, took buyouts as part of an ongoing effort by the site’s corporate parent, Gizmodo Media Group, to trim costs. In October, veteran music publication The Fader laid off its most senior employees .

Here is a list of places *just off the top of my head* that have laid off culture/features reporters and not rehired for them in the last 2 years: -Fusion -MTV News -The Village Voice -Buzzfeed -IBT -Vocativ -LA Weekly -Fader -Inverse -Upworthy -Complex -GQ -Gothamist - — kelsey mckinney (@mckinneykelsey) November 8, 2018

But some publications simply ceased to publish culture writing altogether, when they weren’t going out of business entirely. In particular, independent newspapers like the Village Voice, an important incubator of tremendous cultural writing for decades, shuttered completely , while its connected Voice Media has ceased film and TV coverage entirely as of December 31, 2018. Similarly, the website Mic has more or less been stripped for parts .

The above is not intended as an exhaustive list. Many, many more publications have cut cultural journalism either in part or in whole. And these job losses are often doled out piecemeal — a layoff here, or a position left unfilled after a departure there. The larger picture can be easy to miss unless you happen to notice culture writers announcing they’ve been laid off on Twitter or are a freelancer trying to pitch to an ever-shrinking pool of outlets. But the pool is shrinking, drip by drip.

It would be one thing if some publications were cutting cultural journalists, but those cultural journalists were still able to find jobs elsewhere. But over the past two years, in numerous discussions I’ve had with journalists at all levels of the cultural journalism ecosystem, it’s become more and more clear that the jobs simply aren’t there.

If you look beyond publications that have intentionally reduced the number of culture writers on their staffs, you’ll find many that have curtailed hiring around culture writing — often in favor of expanding political coverage. They’ve either mostly held pat with culture hiring since the 2016 election, or they’ve opted not to fill positions that opened because someone left, shifting those resources toward political writing.

That’s not to say that no one has hired culture writers of late. But for the most part, in 2017 and 2018, from major newspapers to tiny websites, anyone with enough money to hire new journalists usually wasn’t putting it toward an expanded culture section.

On the one hand, I get this. If I were in charge of a major publication, I would probably be hiring political reporters, too. But on the other hand, cultural criticism is important — vitally so. Sure, it’s how I earn a paycheck, but long before I got into this line of work, great cultural journalism gave me other ways of looking at and understanding the world, which is core to journalism’s mission statement. We need cultural criticism not just to tell us which movies to go see and which ones to avoid, but to tell us things we already knew but didn’t know how to express. If reporting can explain the world to us, cultural criticism can explain us to us.

How our pop culture can offer a dim vision of where we might be headed, explained by the rise of Nazism in the early 20th century

One of the foremost critical texts ever written is Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler . Kracauer, a film scholar and critic, escaped his native Germany for France as the Nazis rose to power, then escaped France for the US in early 1941, after the Nazis had conquered the country.

Kracauer is associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxists who attempted to tackle questions of how better to build societies, after finding the various structures proposed in the early 20th century sorely lacking (this is an impossibly brief summary, but if you’re interested in the details or just writing and thought in general, you should read more about the Frankfurt School — try the solid history Grand Hotel Abyss by Stuart Jeffries ). But From Caligari to Hitler is concerned less with questions of how to build societies than it is with how societies build and conceptualize themselves via the dream logic of movies.

Kracauer starts from a seemingly self-evident premise: German expressionist filmmakers (like Robert Wiene, who made the 1920 classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , which gives the book its title) created startlingly artistic statements unlike any others in the rest of the world, shot through with a dark, foreboding sense of impending doom, which paired well with the rise of fascism slowly bubbling away in German society in the ‘20s and early ‘30s.

But Kracauer goes one step further, positing that both these films and the oft-forced cheerfulness of the films that were made after numerous central figures in expressionist movements departed for Hollywood are early psychological manifestations of something within German culture that made Nazism inevitable. He argues that films aren’t just documents of a culture’s values and chosen narrative tropes, but a kind of document of a culture’s subconscious, one that filmmakers often don’t know that they’re making.

Kracauer has a couple of explanations for why he thinks films are so vital to understanding a culture’s psyche, both of which could presumably be applied to television, video games, and maybe even pop music as well.

The first is that while there are always directors or producers “in charge” of a given film, it is inevitably the work of many, many artists — and the more people involved, the more accurately it reflects a culture’s buried hopes. Even if the corporations that make and release films are mostly interested in turning profits, Kracauer suggests, the best way for them to do so is to reflect things that a culture either badly wants to be true or deeply identifies with on some level.

The second is that films address themselves to “the anonymous multitude.” Writes Kracauer in his introduction:

What films reflect are not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions — those deep layers of collective mentality which extend more or less below the dimension of consciousness. ... Owing to diverse camera activities, cutting and many special devices, films are able, and therefore obliged, to scan the whole visible world. ... In the course of their spatial conquests, films of fiction and films of fact alike capture innumerable components of the world they mirror: huge mass displays, casual configurations of human bodies and inanimate objects, and an endless succession of unobtrusive phenomena. As a matter of fact, the screen shows itself particularly concerned with the unobtrusive, the normally neglected. ... That films particularly suggestive of mass desires coincide with outstanding box-office successes would seem a matter of course. But a hit may cater only to one of many coexisting demands, and not even to a very specific one. In her paper on the methods of selection of films to be preserved by the Library of Congress, Barbara Deming elaborates upon this point: “Even if one could figure out ... which were the most popular films, it might turn out that in saving those at the top, one would be saving the same dream over and over again ... and losing other dreams, which did not happen to appear in the most popular individual pictures but did appear over and over again in a great number of cheaper, less popular pictures.”

Kracauer spends the rest of his book providing a long, in-depth overview of German cinema from its inception to the reign of the Nazis, from pre-World War I examples to filmmakers like Leni Riefenstahl. But his central thesis holds true: Every film, even one of more marginal success, tells you something about the culture that produced it, and the more knowledge you have of how films are made, of how they can create false narratives we desperately want to be true, and of how they intersect with other forms of philosophy and thought, the more you can understand how they serve as signposts toward whatever is to come next.

Kracauer’s methods can be applied to our current pop culture — and the most astute cultural critics often do so

Kracauer, of course, was writing his book after the end of World War II. Nazism had been defeated, and German cinema was knocked back by the end of the war as much as everything else in the country. And his timing exposes one of the issues with these sorts of psychological readings — they predict the future, but only if you know what the future looks like already. Which is to say: They are often more useful in hindsight.

I suspect this is why I’ve been thinking so much about The Hateful Eight and its provocative statements about the dark heart of America as 2018 comes to a close; I’ve also been thinking about American Sniper and True Detective and Girls and a host of other entertainments that seemed to herald some sort of budding culture war in the first half of the 2010s with the discussions and debates they started, even as the sleek self-satisfaction of left-leaning media figures in those same years insisted that America was inevitably going to keep pushing further leftward, just very gradually. Demographics had solved everything!

What is important to note here is that the psychologically predictive elements of the works listed above (and numerous others — one could make an argument of this sort surrounding the superhero films of Marvel and DC’s movie studios, for instance ) exist independent of their actual quality. The popular understanding of what a critic does is that a critic tells you whether something is good or bad. But that is the least interesting part of a critic’s job, when all is said and done, because two critics can see the same movie, agree largely on its strengths and flaws, then weight them very differently in their heads .

The true role of a critic is to pull apart the work, to delve into the marrow of it, to figure out what it is trying to say about our society and ourselves. You can love a work and think its politics are deeply problematic; you can believe something is terrible yet offers some accidentally acute insights about the way the world works.

To choose two examples from my list above: I think the second season of True Detective (which was released in the summer of 2015) is an almost unwatchable misfire, a cluttered mess that never once shows any understanding of how to tell a complicated crime story in the time allotted to it. But it’s also one of the more insightful series of its particular generation when it comes to questions of how broken capitalist systems turn people into literal spare parts, exploitable cogs that can be hammered into place and treated like shit because they have no real value as human beings, just as pieces of the larger system. In this fashion, it anticipates more recent TV shows like Westworld and The Handmaid’s Tale , in addition to so many debates we’ve had around politics and populism since it aired.

Girls , meanwhile, remains one of my favorite shows of the decade, but in 2018, it’s much harder to read as anything other than solipsistic. In 2012, when the series debuted, it was easier for at least some critics (myself included) to defend the way Girls ’ protagonists were almost fatally blinkered when it came to the world around them.

Over the course of the show’s six seasons (concluding in 2017), the characters did “grow up,” but their growing up involved so little actual struggle or conflict that it seemed as if the show was unaware of any person who existed outside of online comments sections or the pages of the New Yorker. Its greatest blinders were always to its own characters’ economic and racial privileges, and while it was sometimes aware of that, it was too often not.

And that unawareness is an important puzzle piece in a larger picture of how everything that America would go through in 2016 and beyond was already being stretched to a breaking point in pop culture, which embraced antiheroes who nonetheless exuded a kind of masculine code of ethics all over the place, a kind of dim harbinger of the man in the Oval Office.

None of this is to say that all culture writing should be about Donald Trump. Far from it. That particular rag has been wrung dry. Indeed, many of the most popular works of the past year, both commercially and critically, have been about building better worlds, about utopian ideals, about how great it would be to live in Wakanda (so long as you were in the ruling class), or about how Gilead or the afterlife of The Good Place must be radically altered to create a new, more just way of living.

Once we know where we’re going, all of this will make more sense. But culture writing isn’t about predicting the future — it’s about predicting the present.

Culture writing can help better explain a vast, sometimes contradictory society

When I make the above argument in favor of cultural criticism to journalistic colleagues who deal in what might be dubbed the “hard sciences” of journalism — data-driven, boots-on-the-ground reporting — I am always aware that it sounds just a little fantastical. And there have been many times that I and my critical brethren have just plumb missed something burbling away in the national subconscious. Few critics looked at the pop culture of the early 2010s and said, “Yep, a culture war’s brewing,” even if it seems blindingly obvious in hindsight.

You can attribute at least some of missing that particular boat to the geographical concentration of cultural critics in New York and Los Angeles (where I live). The homogeneity of critics — too many of us are white, too many of us are male, and too many of us live on one of the coasts — is a real problem that needs to be corrected sooner, rather than later, if we are to better understand the dreams a multicultural nation is having, sometimes in parallel and sometimes in bloody intersection.

Perhaps this is why The Hateful Eight looms so large for me even still. It is a movie that juts America’s lofty ideals right up against its bloody reality, a movie that understood better than most that the precipice we all stood on in 2015 was very different from the one we thought we were on. It’s an ugly movie, sure, but maybe it’s an ugly world. Maybe it was telling the truth, and hoping otherwise is a fool’s errand. It embraces contradiction, in a way that still unsettles.

And yet it is not a final answer, and no review of it will ultimately be a final answer. The movie’s meaning — all movies’ meanings — changes with time, as we change with time. No one piece of culture writing can explain us in all our contradictions. That’s why we need more, not less, of the form. There is probably too much stuff out there to ever get any accurate read of exactly what America is worked up about now — except, maybe, in broader trend pieces — but every new film, TV show, book, game, and album is a new brick in the wall, a new argument to be made.

We’re a country of angry, outsized reactions to any fanboy project that dares cast a woman or person of color in its lead, but also one that makes movies like Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians and even BlacKkKlansman successful box office hits. We’re a country of Aquaman and The Mule and On the Basis of Sex — to choose three radically different movies, with very different political views, that were sold out for evening showings at my favorite multiplex a few nights ago. We’re a country where everything from The Big Bang Theory to The Good Place , from Game of Thrones to This Is Us , can be a major hit.

The fact that criticism is, on some level, the work of those of us who sit in a dark room and try to interpret dreams will probably always feel a little suspect to some of my colleagues, but it shouldn’t. It is just as deeply reported, just as astutely interpreted, just as rigorously thought through as any other form of journalism, just in a very different form, one that can sound fantastical but one that has centuries of thought and theory backing it up, all the way back to ancient Greece .

Cultural criticism isn’t necessary just so we know what movie to see when we head to the multiplex. It’s necessary because it is part of how we begin to understand both ourselves and this weird, vibrant, crumbling country we are all a part of.

Better than any data set I can think of, it tells us where we’ve been, where we are, and maybe even where we’re going. It’s vital to any publication, to any newsroom, and to any well-rounded news diet. Now, in 2019, let’s see even more of it.

7 great pieces of culture writing from 2018

If you’re excited to explore some great culture writing from the past year, here are seven of my favorite pieces (one of which isn’t in written form at all) digging into pop culture in all its forms.

“Ten Years Later, The Dark Knight and its vision of guilt still resonate,” Bilge Ebiri for the Village Voice

It’s hard to write a retrospective on a movie or TV show everybody has seen, but Ebiri digs deep into what The Dark Knight said about the late George W. Bush era, then shows how the movie pointed to what was to come.

Where then does that leave Gotham? The Dark Knight ends with the city living a lie, but seemingly out of the darkness. (At least for now, since The Dark Knight Rises would show the disastrous consequences of Gordon and Bruce’s duplicity.) And yet it’s hard to look at this movie, made at a time of violent divisiveness in the country over issues of surveillance, of complicity, of violence born of fear, and not see a snapshot of a society — not Gotham’s fictional one, but our own, real-life one — ready to plunge into the abyss of fragmentation, of self-serving chaos. Maybe that’s why Nolan’s film now feels so poignant. Today, it’s hard not to feel that humanity’s worst impulses have won, that those without conscience or shame were allowed to sow endless dissension, hatred, and cruelty, using our own sense of guilt against us.

“2018’s big horror film trend: inherited trauma,” Britt Hayes for ScreenCrush

I pitched this piece, then watched as Hayes wrote a far better version of it than I could have mustered. It’s a great example of noticing a trend in entertainment, then following it to its logical conclusion.

There is a house. Inside is a miniature dollhouse filled with perfect replicas of a life that could be, or might’ve been. Maybe it’s a better version of that life, but it is silent and still — unlike the people around it, who are consumed by trauma. Curiously, four of this year’s most poignant and effective horror stories — Hereditary , The Haunting of Hill House , Sharp Objects , and Halloween — are thematically connected by their exploration of familial mental illness and inherited trauma, and by these miniature dollhouses, which appear in some form in every single one.

“Why I’ve had trouble buying Hollywood’s vision of girl power,” Alison Willmore for Buzzfeed

Pop feminism was everywhere in 2018, and Willmore starts from a Ruth Bader Ginsburg action figure to dissect just why so much pop feminism feels so empty and consumerist.

2018 has been as rich with slogany, simplified women’s empowerment callouts as it has been with reasons for women to be filled with rage and dread, stretching way beyond the merch and mild cinema that’s come to surround Ginsburg. This kind of messaging has shown up all over the movies this year, and television too, from Ocean’s 8 to the Kevin Spacey-less final season of House of Cards. Some of it was sincerely meant, some of it was calculated as hell, and most of it left me in the dust.

“Hulu’s The Bisexual is here to make every queer a little bit uncomfortable,” Heather Hogan for Autostraddle

This is, ostensibly, just a review of a TV show, but it’s also so much more, pushing past merely telling you whether the show in question is good or not to interrogate Hogan’s own responses to it.

During the first two episodes of The Bisexual , I kept thinking, “There’s not a single queer person on the internet who isn’t going to be offended by this in some way” — and by the end of the season, I understood that was the point.

“ Adventure Time finale review: One of the greatest TV shows ever had a soulful, mind-expanding conclusion,” Darren Franich, Entertainment Weekly

Sometimes, writing critically just means celebrating something you loved. Franich offers a sweetly tempered eulogy to a beloved TV series in this extended breakdown of the finale.

Sans commercials, Monday’s “giantsized” final episode clocked 44 minutes, 47 seconds, the precise length of time it takes your average prestige drama to burp. The series finale — variously titled “The Ultimate Adventure” or “Come Along With Me” — found time for two epic showdowns, three epic kisses, two musical numbers, one gigantic personification of universal chaos. This was a last explosion of imagination, every millisecond a subreddit waiting to happen. Eight years is a healthy run, but the propulsive energy suggested a brilliant-but-canceled oddity, an epic saga with an episode order cut halfway through season 3, an “ending” crammed with ideas that could’ve engine-fueled another five seasons.

“CBS’s toxic culture isn’t just behind the scenes. It’s in the shows that it makes,” Kathryn VanArendonk for Vulture

VanArendonk uses deep knowledge of CBS crime procedurals to point to how a culture of sexual harassment was allowed to flourish not just at the company but in the shows it put on the air.

The stories CBS puts out into the world are the ones that reflect the interests of the people who make them, and what results is a self-perpetuating cycle. When we as CBS viewers watch stories that valorize male ego and male judgment, we’re bathed in a TV landscape that teaches us that men who have power are the default. So when men like Les Moonves, Brad Kern, and Michael Weatherly harass and abuse the women around them, their entitlement to hold positions of power appears normal in the context of the shows they make. They are entitled to that power, and that entitlement is confirmed and echoed by what we watch on TV, night after night.

“ Hereditary hot take,” May Leitz (aka NyxFears) for YouTube

Leitz’s deep dive into Hereditary genuinely changed how I thought about one of my favorite movies of the year and made me appreciate it even more. To say more would be to spoil her reading, but the video essay is peppered with evidence from the film itself.

And, of course, if you’re still looking for great culture writing to read, check out what we publish here at Vox , from Aja Romano on the history of Bert and Ernie as queer icons , to Alissa Wilkinson’s beautiful review of Eighth Grade ; from Alex Abad-Santos’s thoughts on the Victoria’s Secret fashion show in the time of corporate wokeness to Constance Grady on why so many TV shows right now are about people trying to be good. (And, okay, you can read my Gritty explainer if you like.)

Correction: The writers who left Buzzfeed, though culture writers, weren’t primarily focused on writing criticism.

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Cultural Criticism and the Way We Live Now

By Louis Menand

Susan Sontag was against interpretation. Laura Kipnis was against love. Seven were against Thebes. Mark Greif is against everything.

That’s the title of his new book, the subtitle of which is “Essays.” Neither is completely accurate. Greif is against the way things are, but he has hopes for the way things might become. And, although “Against Everything” is put together from essays written over the past twelve years, and published mostly in the journal of which Greif is a founding editor, n+1 , it is really a book on a single subject: contemporary life, more specifically, the kind of life that someone who would buy such a book, or write such a book, or read a column about such a book—in short, yourself—might right now be living. It’s meant to be consumed from beginning to end. It makes you think.

I guess “Against Everything” would be called a work of cultural criticism. I’ve always disliked that term, since it’s related to no body of knowledge and names no actual calling, unlike, say, movie criticism or book reviewing. Also, movies are movies and books are books, but culture is everything. How are you supposed to get a handle on everything?

“We are incompetent to solve the times,” Emerson said (though, characteristically, he then went on to try to solve them), and that has always seemed a sound journalistic maxim to me. The songs, the shows, the books and movies, the art-world sensations, fashion statements, political spectacles, and tech innovations, the celebrities, cover stories, foods, meds, drugs, diets, exercise regimens, and life-style themes that “everyone” seems to be talking about or taking up or disapproving of—there is just too much foreground. It’s like a classroom in which every student’s hand is raised. “Make sense of me ,” they all cry out.

The problem isn’t picking out what will last. That, actually, is relatively easy. Critical reception is imperfect and it’s not always aligned with popular taste, but major oversights are rare. The problem is figuring out, in the constant bombardment of attention-seeking missiles, which ones tell us something about who we are.

The main difficulty is not knowing what’s a trend, what’s a backlash, and what’s a blip. Many years ago, when people began jogging, I predicted, with the confidence of untried youth, that jogging was a fad that couldn’t last. It wasn’t that ordinary-looking people running in public in their shorts seemed kind of unnatural, although it did. I just couldn’t see how an activity that requires only a pair of sneakers could be sufficiently commercialized to become a fixture in the national life style. Such was my ignorance about the money in footwear.

Jogging didn’t end, but it did evolve into the current professional-class practice of “going to the gym”—a more high-cap and economically exploitable enthusiasm, and the subject of one of Greif’s most devastating “against” essays. The essay is devastating even if you think you have a sensible (or lazy) person’s ambivalence about regimented exercise. You will still feel, after reading him, that you have bought into a soul-destroying managerialism that has disguised itself as a means of enhancing “life.” (Greif’s essay on another professional-class fetish, food, is similarly unsettling.) Greif’s hero is Thoreau, which gives you an idea of the radicalism of his disaffection.

The cultural critic’s conceptual enemy is the smoothing formula known as “the wisdom of crowds.” On that theory, it must be the case that the person whose favorite song is the No. 1 song, whose favorite book is a best-seller, whose favorite food just switched from kale to quinoa, is the luckiest person in the world, because the culture is producing exactly the goods that he or she enjoys. This rule would apply right down all the rungs of life-style choices within your demographic: the kind of car you drive, the number of kids you have, where you take your vacations. On a wisdom-of-crowds hypothesis, what most people who are like you choose to do should be the optimal choice for you.

The cultural critic’s answer is that if you are doing what everyone around you is doing, you are not thinking, and if you are not thinking, you are missing out on your own life. The cultural critic is the person who worries that what everyone is doing right now is distracting us from what is really important, and precisely because it’s what everyone is doing.

The trouble, usually, is identifying the alternative. For the marketplace is flooded with alternatives: that’s what all those raised hands represent. You don’t like what all those people are doing? Do what all these people are doing. There are a lot of defiance goods out there offering an adversarial experience—like high-end pop music (for which Greif has a soft spot: his most brilliant essay is an amazingly multilayered piece called “Learning to Rap”).

But you don’t want to mistake some band’s assertion of autonomy (commercially enabled, but let’s leave that aside) for your own. What you want is something that seems unattainable in a society as saturated in mediated desires as ours is: you want uncoerced choice. Greif’s argument—and this is what separates him from the usual solver of the times—is that what’s killing us is deeply embedded in our social and economic system. It’s not the gym that’s the problem. It’s the way we live now, which is making the gym seem like a solution to something.

Greif thinks that a whole lot will have to change before real choice is possible. Until then, it’s not enough to be against the box-office and the real-estate section and the best-seller list. Until then, we have to be against . . . everything.

It’s a peculiarity of this kind of criticism, criticism that takes on the whole culture, that it is often misread. Most people remember David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd” as a critique of mid-century men and women as other-directed, but he actually thought that inner- and outer-direction are mixed in everyone. (He also tied his categories to a prediction about population growth that turned out to be wildly inaccurate, and which he cut from later editions.) Many readers also thought that what Christopher Lasch called “The Culture of Narcissism” referred to a surge of egocentricity. Lasch had to write another book, “The Minimal Self,” to explain that narcissism is symptom of the erosion of ego. Few people remember that one. I don’t think readers will make a mistake about Greif, but it will be interesting to see if they do.

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Writing Curriculum

Analyzing Arts, Criticizing Culture: Writing Reviews With The New York Times

This unit invites students to write about food and fashion, movies and music, books and buildings for a global audience. It features writing prompts, mentor-text lesson plans and a culminating contest.

By The Learning Network

To learn more about all our writing units, visit our writing curriculum overview .

Before the digital age, review writing was largely the province of a small circle of elite tastemakers. That circle still includes critics at The Times, people like A.O. Scott or Pete Wells, who can make or break a movie or a restaurant with a single review.

But these days, all of us are invited to be reviewers — to rate and comment on everything from books and movies to yoga classes and electric toothbrushes. Though this kind of casual writing offers students real audiences and purposes, it often doesn’t require the type of close reading, deep thinking and careful craftsmanship more formal classroom writing demands.

In this unit, we hope to bridge the two, and prove to students that review-writing can be fun.

So why should your students read and write arts and culture reviews? How can doing so fit into your curriculum?

Well, first consider what students will need to know and be able to do:

A cultural review is, of course, a form of argumentative essay. Your class might be writing about Lizzo or “ Looking for Alaska ” instead of, say, climate change or gun control, but they still have to make claims and support them with evidence.

Just as students must for that classroom classic, the literature essay, a reviewer of any genre of artistic expression has to read (or watch, or listen to) a work closely; analyze it and understand its context; and explain what is meaningful and interesting about it.

It may go without saying that review writers have to wrestle with the same questions that writers of any text confront — how to compose in a voice, style, vocabulary and tone that fits one’s subject, audience and purpose. But when you’re writing a review, influencing people is the point, and our unit offers a built-in authentic audience. Beginning with our informal writing prompts and culminating in our review contest, we encourage students to post their work for a global audience of both teenagers and adults to read.

Our contest allows students to write about any work they like from any of 14 categories of expression — including movies, music, restaurants, video games and comedy. To participate, they’ll have to think deeply about the cultural and artistic works that matter most to them, then communicate why to others. That’s not just a skill they need in school, it’s a way of thinking that can serve them for life.

Like all the writing units we publish, this one pulls together a range of flexible resources you can use however you like. While you won’t find a pacing calendar or daily lesson plans, you will find plenty of ways to get your students reading, writing and thinking.

Here are the elements:

Start with four writing prompts that help students become aware of the role of the arts and culture in their lives.

Anatomy of a scene | ‘black panther’, ryan coogler narrates a sequence from his film featuring chadwick boseman as t'challa, a.k.a. black panther..

I’m Ryan Coogler, co-writer and director of “Black Panther”. This scene is an extension of an action set piece that happens inside of a casino in Busan, South Korea. Now, T’Challa is in pursuit of Ulysses Klaue, who’s escaped the casino. He’s eliciting the help of his younger sister, Shuri, here, who’s back home in Wakanda. And she’s remote driving this Lexus sports car. And she’s driving from Wakanda. She’s actually in Wakanda. T’Challa’s in his panther suit on top of the car in pursuit. These are two of T’Challa’s comrades here. It’s Nakia who’s a spy, driving, and Okoye who’s a leader of the Dora Milaje in the passenger’s seat in pursuit of Klaue. The whole idea for this scene is we wanted to have our car chase that was unlike any car chase that we had seen before in combining the technology of Wakanda and juxtaposing that with the tradition of this African warrior culture. And in our film we kind of broke down characters between traditionalists and innovators. We always thought it would be fun to contrast these pairings of an innovator with a traditionalist. T’Challa, we kind of see in this film, is a traditionalist when you first meet him. His younger sister, Shuri, who runs Wakanda’s tech, is an innovator. So we paired them together. In the other car we have Nakia and Okoye, who’s also a traditionalist-innovator pairing. Nakia is a spy who we learn is kind of unconventional. And Okoye, who’s a staunch traditionalist, probably one of our most traditional characters in the film, you know, she doesn’t really like being in clothes that aren’t Wakandan. And this scene is kind of about her really bringing the Wakandan out. One of the images that almost haunted me was this image of this African woman with this red dress just blowing behind her, you know, spear out. And so a big thing was, like, you know, for me was getting the mount right so that the dress would flow the right way. It wouldn’t be impeded by the bracing system she was sitting on. So that took a lot of time. We had to play with the fabric and the amount of the dress to get it right.

While the teenagers you know may be able to talk passionately about music, movies, food and fashion, they may never have had formal practice in communicating the complex observations and analysis behind those reactions. It’s possible that they have also never been pushed to experience forms of art or culture that are new to them.

We developed these five prompts in 2019, but of course they can work for any year of this contest. Invite your students to read what others have previously posted, or contribute their own ideas.

Do You Read Reviews?

What Work of Art or Culture Would You Recommend That Everyone Experience?

What Work of Art or Culture Would You Warn Others to Avoid? Why?

What Could You Read, Listen to or Watch to Stretch Your Cultural Imagination?

What Was the Best Art and Culture You Experienced in 2020?

Whether they’ll ultimately participate in our contest or not, we hope your students will have fun answering these questions — and then enjoy reading the work of other students, commenting on it, and maybe even hitting that “Recommend” button if they read a response they especially like.

All our prompts are open for comment by students 13 and up, and every comment is read by Times editors before it is approved.

Continue with our lesson plan, “ Thinking Critically: Reading and Writing Culture Reviews. ”

This lesson, published in 2015 on a previous iteration of our site, helps students understand the basics.

What experience do they already have with reviews?

What is the role of criticism in our culture?

What are some guidelines for reading any review?

It can be taught as a whole, or you can just use the elements you need to get your students started.

Read mentor texts by adults and by teenagers, and try out some of the “writer’s moves.”

Making an argument via descriptive details with elizabeth, a winner of our 2019 student review contest takes us behind the scenes of her winning essay..

“There is no single term that can adequately define music sensation Lizzo, but bop star, band-geek-turned-pop-icon, classical flutist, self-love trailblazer and inclusivity advocate are all apt descriptors.” ”‘Lizzo in Concert, A Dynamic Reminder of the Power of Self-Acceptance’ by Elizabeth Phelps.” “The review is about a concert that I went to in Washington, D.C., and I went to see Lizzo.” “At her Washington, D.C. concert, she took the audience to church, and center stage, from a gold pulpit lit up with her name, Lizzo preached a message of joy, self-love and celebration.” “Yeah, I’d love to talk a little bit more about that theme of church that runs throughout. Can you tell me a little bit how you came up with that idea. And then how you developed it throughout the review?” “Sure. So, I came up with the idea for church because that’s really what the scene kind of looked and felt like the at the show itself, because she had like an actual podium and then there was like big stained glass windows looking things behind her. So it definitely had that vibe.” “Every ounce of her performance shone with positivity. Even before she appeared, the bright podium and large flats made to look like stained glass windows, gave the audience a taste of the revelry ahead.” “In history, like the Black church has been used to bring people together who may have been marginalized or diminished and passed aside, and I think that was kind of influenced by what was happening on stage, too, because it was another way that people were being unified and being uplifted, just like a church service would. So I tried to keep that theme going in a couple of ways.” “Then, clad in a silver leotard, she appeared at the pulpit and belted out the first song of her set: “Worship,” an anthem of confidence and self-love.” “An anthem, to me, is something, like the actual definition is a song that unifies a group of people for a particular cause. And I thought that that was so emblematic of what was happening because it was bringing everybody together, because the song is all about like, ‘worship me, I know I’m really awesome. And I’m really confident in myself.’ And I thought that it was a strong way to open with this anthem of like unifying all these people, being like, you can love yourself. I am confident in who I am.” “Therein lies the power of Lizzo’s music. It is a place for people of all colors, creeds and backgrounds to come together and celebrate self-acceptance and positivity.” “I really liked that line, too, because I thought it illustrated this unifying nature of what was happening, which I think is what the show was really about. It was about bringing people together and celebrating themselves and celebrating everybody’s differences and how they’re unique and important in their own way.” “The one thing that was very clear to me was the one thought that stuck in my head the whole time was I cannot let Lizzo down, I cannot do her dirty by writing a bad review, or a review that’s not up to the standard of what she has done.”

Our related Review Mentor Texts spotlight 10 pieces, five by Times critics from across the Arts and Culture sections, and five by teenage winners of our previous student review contests.

Each focuses on key elements of this kind of writing, and aligns with the criteria in our contest rubric:

Expressing Critical Opinions: Two Movie Reviews

Learning From Negative Reviews: ‘Aquaman’ and Mumble Rap

Making an Argument via Descriptive Detail: Two Music Reviews

Using Sensory Images: Restaurant Reviews

Addressing Audience: Two Book Reviews

Like all our editions in the Mentor Texts series, these include guidance on reading and analyzing the texts themselves, as well as a “Now Try This” exercise that lets students practice a specific technique or element.

We also provide over 25 additional mentor texts that review both the popular culture students are likely already familiar with — from Ariana Grande to Apple AirPods — as well as other works we think they may enjoy. The goal of this series is to demystify what good writing looks like, and encourage students to experiment with some of those techniques themselves.

And, of course, we always recommend learning from the teenage winners of our previous review contests. You can find winning work from 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , 2017 , 2016 and 2015 to show your students, and invite them to identify “writer’s moves” they’d like to emulate.

Finally, in the past year, we have added three additional resources via our Annotated by the Author series. Invite your students to learn from Manohla Dargis, The Times’s co-chief film critic, as she reveals her writing and research process for her review of the 2021 film “Dune.” Or, have students check out the work of two winners of our 2019 Student Review Contest: Elizabeth Phelps, who writes about why going to a Lizzo concert is like going to church , and Henry Hsiao who explains how he writes with his audience in mind .

Take Advice from Times Critics

In 2020, we interviewed four New York Times Critics — A.O. Scott, Maya Phillips, Jennifer Szalai, and Jon Pareles — and asked them to share their review writing advice for students. Among their suggestions: express a strong opinion, use descriptive details and don’t be afraid to edit. In our post “ Want to Write a Review? Here’s Advice From New York Times Critics ,” we pair the critics’ video interviews with reflection questions for students to consider as they write their own reviews.

We also have an earlier handout that features insights from more Times critics.

Finally, you can watch an edited version of our webinar “ How to Teach Review Writing With The New York Times ” below.

Enter our Review Contest.

By the end of the unit, your students will have read several mentor texts, practiced elements of review writing with each one, and, we hope, thought deeply about the role of criticism in our society in general.

Now we invite them to play critic and produce one polished piece of writing that brings it all together.

Part of the reason we created this contest is to encourage young people to stretch their cultural imaginations. We hope they’ll choose a work that is new and interesting for them, whether that’s a book, a movie, a television show, an album, a game, a restaurant, a building, or a live performance. We hope they’ll take close notes on their experiences, and tell us about it engagingly, making their case with voice and style.

All student work will be read by our staff, volunteers from the Times newsroom and/or by educators from around the country. Winners will have their work published on our site and, perhaps, in the print New York Times.

Our Seventh Annual Review Contest runs from Nov. 10 to Dec. 15, 2021. Visit this page for all the details.

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Cultural critique.

Cultural critique is a broad field of study that employs many different theoretical traditions to analyze and critique cultural formations. Because culture is always historically and con textually determined, each era has had to develop its own methods of cultural analysis in order to respond to new technological innovations, new modes of social organization, new economic formations, and novel forms of oppression, exploitation, and subjugation.

The modern European tradition of cultural critique can be traced back to Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) seminal essay entitled ‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ Here, Kant opposed theocratic and authoritarian forms of culture with a liberal, progressive, and humanist culture of science, reason, and critique. By organizing society under the guiding principles of critical reason, Kant believed that pre Enlightenment superstition and ignorance would be replaced by both individual liberty and universal peace.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) historicized Kant’s version of critique through a technique called genealogy. Nietzsche argued that Kant’s necessary universals are born from historical struggles between competing interests. Compared to Greek culture, Nietzsche saw contemporary Germany as degenerate. Prominent figures such as David Strauss and Friedrich Schiller represented ‘‘cultural philistines’’ who promoted cultural conformity to a massified, standardized, and superficial culture. Thus contemporary culture blocked the revitalization of a strong, creative, and vital society of healthy geniuses. Here Nietzsche rested his faith not in universal categories of reason but rather in the aristocratic will to power to com bat the ‘‘herd mentality’’ of German mass culture.

Like Nietzsche, Karl Marx (1818–83) also rejected universal and necessary truths outside of history. Using historical materialism as his major critical tool, Marx argued that the dominant culture legitimated current exploitative economic relations. In short, the class that controls the economic base also controls the production of cultural and political ideas. Whereas Nietzsche traced central forms of mass culture back to the hidden source of power animating them, Marx traced cultural manifestations back to their economic determinates. Here culture is derived from antagonistic social relations conditioned by capitalism, which distorts both the content and the form of ideas. Thus for Marx, cultural critique is essentially ideological critique exposing the interests of the ruling class within its seemingly natural and universal norms.

Whereas Kant defined the proper uses of reason for the creation of a rational social order, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) argued that the liberal humanist tradition failed to actualize its ideal because it did not take into account the eternal and unavoidable conflict between culture and the psychological unconscious. Freud argued that the complexity of current society has both positive and negative psychological implications. On the one hand, individuals have a certain degree of security and stability afforded to them by society. Yet at the same time, this society demands repression of aggressive instincts, which turn inward and direct themselves toward the ego. This internalization of aggression results in an overpowering super ego and attending neurotic symptoms and pathologies. For Freud, such a conflict is not the result of economic determination (as we saw with Marx), but rather is a struggle fundamental to the social contract and is increasingly exacerbated by the social demand for conformity, utility, and productivity.

With the Frankfurt School of social theory, cultural critique attempted to synthesize the most politically progressive and theoretically innovative strands of the former cultural theories. Max Horkheimer (1895–1971), Theodor Adorno (1903–69), and Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) are three of the central members of the Frankfurt School who utilized a transdisciplinary method that incorporated elements of critical reason, genealogy, historical materialism, sociology, and psychoanalysis to analyze culture. While heavily rooted in Marxism, the members of the Frankfurt School increasingly distanced themselves from Marx’s conception of the centrality of economic relations, focusing instead on cultural and political methods of social control produced through new media technologies and a burgeoning culture industry. In the classic text Dialectic of Enlightenment (1948), Horkheimer and Adorno demonstrate that Kant’s reliance on reason has not resulted in universal peace but rather increasing oppression, culminating in fascism. Here reason becomes a new form of dogmatism, its own mythology predicated on both external domination of nature and internal domination of psychological drives. This dialectic of Enlightenment reason reveals itself in the rise of the American culture industry whose sole purpose is to produce docile, passive, and submissive workers. Marcuse argued along similar lines, proposing that the American ‘‘one dimensional’’ culture has effectively destroyed the capacity for critical and oppositional thinking. Thus many members of the Frankfurt School (Adorno in particular) adopted a highly pessimistic attitude toward ‘‘mass culture,’’ and, like Nietzsche, took refuge in ‘‘high’’ culture.

While the Frankfurt School articulated cultural conditions in a stage of monopoly capital ism and fascist tendencies, British cultural studies emerged in the 1960s when, first, there was widespread global resistance to consumer capitalism and an upsurge of revolutionary movements. British cultural studies originally was developed by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson to preserve working class culture against colonization by the culture industry. Thus both British cultural studies and the Frankfurt School recognized the central role of new consumer and media culture in the erosion of working class resistance to capitalist hegemony. Yet there are distinct differences between British cultural studies and proponents of Frankfurt School critical theory. Whereas the Frankfurt School turned toward the modernist avantgarde as a form of resistance to instrumental reason and capitalist culture, British cultural studies turned toward the oppositional potentials within youth subcultures. As such, British cultural studies was able to recognize the ambiguity of media culture as a contested terrain rather than a monolithic and one dimensional product of the capitalist social relations of production.

Currently, cultural critique is attempting to respond to a new era of global capitalism, hybridized cultural forms, and increasing control of information by a handful of media conglomerates. As a response to these economic, social, and political trends, cultural critique has expanded its theoretical repertoire to include multicultural, postcolonial, and feminist critiques of culture. African American feminist theorist bell hooks is an exemplary representative of new cultural studies who analyzes the interconnected nature of gender, race, and class oppressions operating in imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Scholars of color such as hooks and Cornell West critique not only ongoing forms of exclusion, marginalization, and fetishization of the ‘‘other’’ within media culture, but also the classical tools of cultural criticism. Through insights generated by these scholars, cultural criticism is reevaluating its own internal complicity with racism, sexism, colonialism, and homophobia and in the process gaining a new level of self reflexivity that enables it to become an increasingly powerful tool for social emancipation.

References:

• Durham, M. G. & Kellner, D. (2001) Media and Cultural Studies. Blackwell, Malden, MA.
• Freud, S. (1930) Civilization and its Discontents. J. Cape & H. Smith, New York.
• Kant, I. (1992) Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Ed. P. Guyer & A. Wood. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Kellner, D. (1989) Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
• Nietzsche, F. (1989) On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Vintage, New York.
• Tucker, R. (Ed.) (1978) The Marx Engels Reader. Norton, New York.

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English: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Criticism

How to use this guide, literary & cultural criticism: background & context, literary & cultural critics / book reviews & bibliographies.

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Welcome to the Introduction to Literary and Cultural Criticism Guide. Use the table of contents to find definitions, topic overviews, books, articles, and more that will help you with your research. 

If you don't find what you are looking for or need help navigating this guide or any of the resources it contains, don't hesitate to contact the author of this guide or Ask a Librarian .

Want to learn more about the background and context of literary scholarship? Below is a selection of resources that can help you to develop a better understanding of literary research, including the discourses of critical theory.

Always remember that research is not a linear process--it takes a lot of moving back and forth between sources and ideas to understand a topic and how it has developed over time.

• A Dictionary of Critical Theory This is the most wide-ranging and up-to-date dictionary of critical theory available, covering the whole range of critical theory, including the Frankfurt school, cultural materialism, gender studies, literary theory, hermeneutics, historical materialism, and sociopolitical critical theory. Entries clearly explain even the most complex of theoretical discourses, such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism.
• Critical Terms for Literary Study Each essay in this collection provides a concise history of a literary term, critically explores the issues and questions the term raises, and then puts theory into practice by showing the reading strategies the term permits.
• Key Terms in Literary Theory This book provides precise definitions of terms and concepts in literary theory, along with explanations of the major movements and figures in literary and cultural theory and an extensive bibliography.
• Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a comprehensive reference work dealing with all aspects of its subject: history, types, movements, prosody, and critical terminology.
• A History of Femnist Literary Criticism This book offers a comprehensive guide to the history and development of feminist literary criticism and a lively reassessment of the main issues and authors in the field.
• The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism presents a comprehensive historical survey of the field's most important figures, schools, and movements. It includes alphabetically arranged entries and subentries on critics and theorists, critical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods. In print in the library's reference collection (PN81.Z99 J64 1994)
• Oxford English Dictionary (OED) A complete text of the Oxford English dictionary with quarterly updates, including revisions not available in any other form.

The resources in this section provide information such as brief intellectual biographies of literary and cultural critics as well as annotations and reviews of the current scholarship on a topic.

I. Literary and Cultural Critics  Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online Tip: what you are likely to find here This type of sources offer overviews and summaries; use them to gather, possibly, the following information: 1. A literary/cultural critics/theorist's contribution in the field of literature . * his/her "new" approach/method/theory * his/her "impact" on the scholarship of a particular type of literature 2. Seminal publications by and about a critic/theorist (as mentioned in the essays and listed in the bibliographies) * note authors/scholars who are experts on the critic or the theory * note major journals in the fields, where you are likely to find current scholarship on your topics. * Are there scholars/journals from other fields as well? 3. People, events, ... related to an art historian * how a critic/theorist is shaped by his/her education; * who or what influenced their theory; * what was the field of study like prior. II. Recent Bibliographies & Reviews of Books    Literary and Critical Theory (an annotated bibliography) The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory Dissertations and Theses ( Check out the bibliographies of recent dissertations on a topic. ) Dissertation Reviews ( yet to be published, which " offer a glimpse of each discipline's immediate present ") H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences (1994 - ) New York Review of Books (1963 - ) Tip: Questions to ask about reviews of books 1.   You might consider such questions as: Does the reviewer agree or disagree with the book’s theses and approaches? Does the  reviewer provide new evidence not included in the book? What does  the reviewer see as the relevance of the book? What  questions not included in the book does the reviewer identify? Based on  this book review, what do you think are a few of the major questions or methodologies being used in your chosen field?  2. What's the next larger context? When there Aren't any (or many) books published on your topic, try place your idea in the knowledge hierarchy. For examples: connect Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling with 16th-century Italian art, focusing on patronage in Rome during the Renaissance and Baroque periods; or, dealing with influential Italian artists through history, etc.?

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Introduction: Rethinking Cultural Criticism—New Voices in the Digital Age

• First Online: 01 December 2020

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In this introduction, we outline the book’s overall take on the rethinking of cultural criticism in the digital age. First, we outline the book’s approach to its two key concepts, culture and criticism. Our goal is not to offer an exhaustive definition of either concept but to provide a context for the subsequent chapters and how they contribute new theoretical and empirical perspectives to current understandings of cultural criticism. Second, we contextualize the book in broader scholarly debates about changing notions of cultural authority and expertise in the digital age, occasioned by the hybrid media ecology and its intertwined mass media and social media logics, and how these developments reconfigure traditional valorization circuits and modes of performing cultural criticism. Finally, we summarize how the chapters in the book address these newer conditions for and dimensions of cultural criticism in the digital age.

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Kristensen, N.N., From, U., Haastrup, H.K. (2021). Introduction: Rethinking Cultural Criticism—New Voices in the Digital Age. In: Kristensen, N.N., From, U., Haastrup, H.K. (eds) Rethinking Cultural Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7474-0_1

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The ten best culture criticism reads

On the eve of lynne tillman's new essay collection, we chart our top picks for reading beyond the obvious.

It could be said, with an eye roll or sardonic sigh, that the late-20th-century’s New Journalism gave way to (pop) cultural criticism gave way to, ahem, BuzzFeed. But that linear evolution leaves out a lot of really smart shit. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem , John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead , Consider the Lobster  – what   anyone who knows anything about what university departments sometimes call "creative nonfiction" worships at the alter of these precursors of the self-satisfied grad student blogger, and rightly so: nonfiction often feels more direct – and more interactive – than fiction or poetry. Plus, who doesn’t love a good nuanced take on an interesting cultural figure or phenomenon?

Next week, the possibly unfairly esoteric but beloved art/culture critic Lynne Tillman will release her new essay collection, What Would Lynne Tillman Do? , through the indie publisher Red Lemonade, and it’s cause to revisit writers who face the line between themselves and the culture head on. Check out our picks for reading that goes beyond the obvious. 

MY 1980S AND OTHER ESSAYS BY WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

The Venn diagram of criticism and manifesto has a large overlap, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Koestenbaum’s understanding of major cultural/artistic figures from John Ashbury to Lana Turner is idiosyncratic without being annoying, forceful while leaving room for readers to have the oh-my-God realizations that make reading really good essays feel really good.

FORTY-ONE FALSE STARTS: ESSAYS ON ARTISTS AND WRITERS BY JANET MALCOLM

Malcolm is known for her sometimes-seething criticism, and this collection of essays on well-known artists and writers certainly does not fall into the category of blind praise. The journalist turns what start out as profiles into complicated meditations on the nature of art and literature that press hard on easy understandings of either.

WHITE GIRLS BY HILTON ALS

In this hotly anticipated genre-bender out from McSweeney’s last year, Als plays with form to craft an elegant argument out of material not always strictly nonfictional, and the result feels more truthful than what we might consider strictly truth. His challenge of the idea of categories umbrellas his experiments with form and drives home insights on race, gender, sexuality, art—all the good stuff, basically. 

THIS IS RUNNING FOR YOUR LIFE BY MICHELLE ORANGE

A lot of emphasis on the status quo circles back to the fucking thereof, but Orange’s 2013 collection is more about a subtle showcasing of why it’s fucked up. Her subjects range from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to Hawaii, but they’re connected by a critique of a society more and more mediated by, well, media, as well as Orange’s funny, intimate personal stories.

LIVING, THINKING, LOOKING: ESSAYS BY SIRI HUSTVEDT

Hustvedt’s novels explore the intersection between life and art (and artists), and these essays – collected from between 2006 and 2011 – do more of the same. Despite the book’s ostensible attempt at categorisation – "Living" is personal experiences, "Thinking" is essays on psychology, "Looking" is about aesthetics and art – we all know that sections all huddle under the umbrella: but what does it all mean?

CHANGING MY MIND BY ZADIE SMITH

Everyone’s favourite quietly sassy novelist also writes essays, and they’re just as sadly smart as her fiction. Smith somehow manages to convey the sense of relentless questioning of what it all means (see above) while also seeming to have it all figured out. That she’s also, in the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a ‘hot babe’, lends her near-deity status among public intellectuals.

THE POSSESSED: ADVENTURES WITH RUSSIAN BOOKS AND PEOPLE WHO READ THEM BY ELIF BATUMAN

While insights on life and the meaning of can often offer that aha moment so sought after in essay reading, in a sea of pop culture criticism a very specific theme can lend itself to originality. Does a memoir about writing/studying criticism count as a memoir? The Possessed engages with cultural theory, literature, and the wacky travel story to push the boundaries of both critical and narrative nonfiction in a way that will appeal to anyone who’s ever been like, ‘I should really reread Anna Karenina.’

AGAINST INTERPRETATION BY SUSAN SONTAG

It could be argued that interpretation is the entire point of this top ten list, as well as top ten lists in general. It could be argued that art is being subsumed by the intellectual interpretation thereof. It could be argued that this entire thing is an exercise in meaningless abstraction. A lot of things could be argued, in fact.

NO MORE NICE GIRLS BY ELLEN WILLIS

The sort-of manifesto is popular terrain for feminist essayists, and Ellen Willis’s "countercultural essays" focus on the decline of liberalism in the late twentieth-century and are not easily gettable. For anyone interested in radical feminism, it’s required reading; for anyone else, it’s ‘interesting’ in that doubt-creating way political essays should be.

CULTURAL AMNESIA BY CLIVE JAMES  

Are you looking for a giant book to keep casually open on your bedside table? After finishing a book, do you like to feel like you know everything? Although James’ nearly-900-pager is explicitly concerned with himself – his favourite cultural figures, his interpretative "marginalia" on his favourite cultural figures – the tome-and-a-half should be commended for being up front about it — that is, after all, what cultural criticism is.

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Essay on Cultural Criticism

Students are often asked to write an essay on Cultural Criticism in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Cultural Criticism

Understanding cultural criticism.

Cultural criticism is a method of studying culture. It looks at how society’s beliefs, traditions, and customs shape our actions and thoughts. It’s about understanding different cultures and their impact on us.

The Importance of Cultural Criticism

Cultural criticism is important because it helps us understand our own culture better. It makes us more aware of our beliefs and traditions, and how they affect our lives.

How Cultural Criticism Works

Cultural criticism involves studying different aspects of culture, like art, literature, and music. It analyzes these aspects to understand what they say about our society and its values.

The Impact of Cultural Criticism

By studying cultural criticism, we can learn to appreciate different cultures better. It helps us to be more open-minded and accepting of other people’s cultures and traditions.

250 Words Essay on Cultural Criticism

Introduction to cultural criticism.

Cultural criticism is a method of analyzing society through the lens of culture, examining the ways in which societal norms, values, and beliefs shape and are shaped by the shared experiences of a community. It is a field deeply rooted in the humanities and social sciences, drawing from disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and literary studies.

The Objectives of Cultural Criticism

Cultural criticism aims to uncover the underlying ideologies that inform and influence our perceptions of the world. It seeks to challenge dominant narratives and expose the power dynamics that exist within cultural expressions. Through this lens, cultural critics are able to explore the complex relationship between culture and power, and how these elements intersect with issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

The Role of Cultural Criticism in Society

In contemporary society, cultural criticism plays a vital role in fostering critical thinking and encouraging societal growth. By dissecting cultural phenomena, critics can reveal the hidden biases and assumptions that often go unnoticed. This process of cultural deconstruction not only helps to illuminate the social structures that perpetuate inequality, but also provides a platform for marginalized voices to be heard.

In conclusion, cultural criticism is an essential tool in understanding the world around us. It allows us to scrutinize the cultural narratives we consume on a daily basis, fostering a deeper awareness of the societal structures that shape our lives. Through the practice of cultural criticism, we can strive towards a more equitable and inclusive society.

500 Words Essay on Cultural Criticism

Introduction.

Cultural criticism is an intellectual practice that explores the cultural narratives that shape societies and individuals. It examines the norms, ideologies, and beliefs that are embedded in art, literature, media, and everyday life, providing a lens through which we can critique and understand our culture.

The Essence of Cultural Criticism

Cultural criticism is more than just an analysis of cultural products or artifacts. It’s a deep dive into the symbolic and ideological dimensions of culture. Its primary aim is to unmask the power structures, biases, and ideologies that are often subtly encoded in cultural texts and practices. This form of criticism is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on fields such as sociology, anthropology, history, media studies, and literary criticism.

Power and Ideology in Cultural Criticism

Cultural criticism is deeply concerned with power relations and ideological structures. It seeks to uncover how power is distributed and maintained in society, and how ideology shapes our perceptions and understanding of the world. For instance, a cultural critic might examine how gender norms are perpetuated in popular media, or how racial stereotypes are reinforced in literature.

Cultural Criticism and Social Change

Cultural criticism is not just about understanding culture; it’s also about challenging and changing it. By revealing the hidden biases and power structures in cultural practices, cultural criticism can help to foster social change. It can expose and challenge the status quo, providing a platform for marginalized voices and perspectives.

Methodologies in Cultural Criticism

Cultural criticism employs a variety of methodologies, including semiotics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and Marxist theory. These methods enable critics to dissect cultural products and practices, revealing their underlying meanings and ideologies. For instance, semiotics might be used to analyze the symbolism in a film, while deconstruction could be applied to unpack the binary oppositions in a novel.

Challenges in Cultural Criticism

Despite its potential for revealing hidden ideologies and fostering social change, cultural criticism also faces several challenges. One of these is the risk of overinterpretation – reading too much into a cultural text or practice. Another challenge is the potential for cultural relativism, where all cultural practices are seen as equally valid, potentially overlooking harmful or oppressive practices.

In conclusion, cultural criticism is a vital intellectual practice that enables us to understand and critique our culture. It exposes the power structures and ideologies that shape our societies and identities, offering a platform for social change. Despite its challenges, cultural criticism is an essential tool for anyone seeking to understand the complex interplay between culture, power, and ideology.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Literary Criticism — Using Cultural Criticism Lens in Understanding Literary Texts

Using Cultural Criticism Lens in Understanding Literary Texts

• Categories: Literary Criticism

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Published: Apr 17, 2023

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Introduction, cultural criticism, conclusion .

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Is culture criticism too nice these days?

Culture writers delia cai and niko stratis discuss how the art of criticism has evolved, and where it's landed.

Social Sharing

Writer and editor Delia Cai  has started a pop-up blog that invites critics to write anonymous reviews of things they hate — from modern menswear, to boring media parties and the film American Fiction .

Today on Commotion , Delia joins host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to explain why she created Hate Read , and freelance culture critic Niko Stratis weighs in on whether art criticism is facing an existential crisis.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show, plus  on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts .

Panel produced by Jane van Koeverden.

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Situation Critical Fall 2016

The weight of criticism.

Critic comes from a Greek word meaning “judge.”[1] It would appear to follow that the practice of criticism could straightforwardly be defined as the practice of judging. However, when faced with the question of the whys, whats, and hows of criticism, Read more…

High Culture, and Other Completely Arbitrary Things Rich People Have Claimed

If there’s one thing I despise, it’s haughtiness. And also unwashed dishes, seltzer water, and whoever picks the Game of the Year (Witcher 3? Really?).

The Critics: Are They to Teach and Judge?

“For all criticism is based on that equation: KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT. The key word here is meaningful. People who have strong reactions to a work—and most of us do—but don’t possess the wider erudition that can give Read more…

Culture in the Hands of the Critic

  The term criticism has a bad reputation, so much so that high school teachers everywhere remind students about “constructive criticism” before any mutual evaluation occurs in the classroom. However, the phrase constructive criticism is, or should be, redundant. Criticism Read more…

Critical to the Last Drop

  What is the role of a critic? This question seems to be ever more popular, usually posed with something of a smirk—Critics? Who needs them?—as the once-strong voices of our critics are sucked deeper and deeper into the noise Read more…

The Critics: With the Power of Words

1. “[…] an extended use of the adjectival form [cultural] in more specialist and academic languages. And whole fields of knowledge are now described as cultural. If cultural studies and cultural critique led the way here, the fields of cultural Read more…

Criticism in the Amazon Age

“But some of these concerns become moot when you think back to the impulse that lies behind serious criticism: the impulse to analyze, to explain, to teach, to judge meaningfully.”-Mendelsohn   “The art critic, however, formalizes and deliberately exemplifies the Read more…

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Do Critics Need Stanchions Too?

“…criticism doesn’t mean delivering petty, ill-tempered Simon Cowell-like put-downs. It doesn’t necessarily mean heaping scorn. It means making fine distinctions. It means talking about ideas, aesthetics and morality as if these things matter (and they do). It’s at base an Read more…

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“For all criticism is based on that equation: KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT.” – Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker “The art critic, however, formalizes and deliberately exemplifies the role of the spectator who realizes the artist’s work—not by leaving Read more…

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24 What Is New Historicism? What Is Cultural Studies?

When we use New Historicism or cultural studies as our lens, we seek to understand literature and culture by examining the historical and cultural contexts in which literary works were produced and by exploring the ways in which literature and culture influence and are influenced by social and political power dynamics. For our exploration of these critical methods, we will consider the literary work’s context as the center of our target.

New Historicism is often associated with the work of Stephen Greenblatt , who argued that literature is not a timeless reflection of universal truths, but rather a product of the historical and cultural contexts in which it was produced. Greenblatt emphasized the importance of studying the social, political, and economic factors that shaped literary works, as well as the ways in which those works in turn influenced the culture and politics of their time.

New Historicism also seeks to break down the boundaries between high and low culture, and to explore the ways in which literature and culture interact with other forms of discourse and representation, such as science, philosophy, and popular culture.

One of the key principles of New Historicism is the idea that literature and culture are never neutral or objective, but are always implicated in power relations and struggles. It also emphasizes the importance of the reader or interpreter in shaping the meaning of a text, arguing that our own historical and cultural contexts influence the way we understand and interpret literary works. When using this method, we often talk about cultural artifacts as part of the discourse of their time period.

New Historicism has been influential in a variety of fields, including literary and cultural studies, history, and anthropology. It has been used to analyze a wide range of literary works, from Shakespeare to contemporary novels, as well as other cultural artifacts such as films and popular music.

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing literature that emerged in the late 20th century. Unlike traditional literary criticism that focuses solely on the text itself, cultural studies criticism explores the relationship between literature and culture. It considers how literature reflects, influences, and is influenced by the broader cultural, social, political, and historical contexts in which it is produced and consumed.

In cultural studies literary criticism, scholars may examine how literature intersects with issues such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and power dynamics. The goal is to understand how literature participates in and shapes cultural discourses. This approach emphasizes the importance of considering the cultural and social implications of literary texts, as well as the ways in which literature can be a site of contestation and negotiation.

Key concepts in cultural studies literary criticism include hegemony, representation, identity, and the politics of culture. Scholars in this field often draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including postcolonial theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory, to analyze and interpret literary works in their cultural context. We will explore these approaches to literature in more depth in future parts of the book.

Learning Objectives

• Understand how formal elements in literary texts create meaning within the context of culture and literary discourse. (CLO 2.1
• Using a literary theory, choose appropriate elements of literature (formal, content, or context) to focus on in support of an interpretation (CLO 2.3)
• Emphasize what the work does and how it does it with respect to form, content, and context (CLO 2.4
• Understand how context impacts the reading of a text, and how different contexts can bring about different readings (CLO 4.1)
• Demonstrate through discussion and/or writing how textual interpretation can change given the context from which one reads (CLO 6.2)
• Understand that interpretation is inherently political, and that it reveals assumptions and expectations about value, truth, and the human experience (CLO 7.1)

Scholarship: An Excerpt from the Introduction to Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and historian, is widely credited with the ideas about history that led to the development of New Historicism as an approach to literary texts. In this passage, Foucault explains his aims in proposing that history does not consist of stable facts. Understanding Foucault’s approach to history is necessary for understanding the New Historicism critical approach to literature.

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should like to begin with a few observations. My aim is not to transfer to the field of history, and more particularly to the history of knowledge (connaissances), a structuralist method that has proved valuable in other fields of analysis. My aim is to uncover the principles and consequences of an autochthonous transformation that is taking place in the field of historical knowledge. It may well be that this, transformation, the problems that it raises, the tools that it uses, the concepts that emerge from it, and the results that it obtains are not entirely foreign to what is called structural analysis. But this kind of analysis is not specifically used; my aim is most decidedly not to use the categories of cultural totalities (whether world-views, ideal types, the particular spirit of an age) in order to impose on history, despite itself, the forms of structural analysis. The series described, the limits fixed, the comparisons and correlations made are based not on the old philosophies of history, but are intended to question teleologies and totalisations; in so far as my aim is to define a method of historical analysis freed from the anthropological theme, it is clear that the theory that I am about to outline has a dual relation with the previous studies. It is an attempt to formulate, in general terms (and not without a great deal of rectification and elaboration), the tools that these studies have used or forged for themselves in the course of their work. But, on the other hand, it uses the results already obtained to define a method of analysis purged of all anthropologism. The ground on which it rests is the one that it has itself discovered. The studies of madness and the beginnings of psychology, of illness and the beginnings of a clinical medicine, of the sciences of life, language, and economics were attempts that were carried out, to some extent, in the dark: but they gradually became clear, not only because little by little their method became more precise, but also because they discovered – in this debate on humanism and anthropology – the point of its historical possibility. In short, this book, like those that preceded it, does not belong – at least directly, or in the first instance – to the debate on structure (as opposed to genesis, history, development); it belongs to that field in which the questions of the human being, consciousness, origin, and the subject emerge, intersect, mingle, and separate off. But it would probably not be incorrect to say that the problem of structure arose there too. This work is not an exact description of what can be read in Madness and Civilisation, Naissance de la clinique, or The Order of Things. It is different on a great many points. It also includes a number of corrections and internal criticisms. Generally speaking, Madness and Civilisation accorded far too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what I called an ‘experiment’, thus showing to what extent one was still close to admitting an anonymous and general subject of history; in Naissance de la clinique, the frequent recourse to structural analysis threatened to bypass the specificity of the problem presented, and the level proper to archaeology; lastly, in The Order of Things, the absence of methodological signposting may have given the impression that my analyses were being conducted in terms of cultural totality. It is mortifying that I was unable to avoid these dangers: I console myself with the thought that they were intrinsic to the enterprise itself, since, in order to carry out its task, it had first to free itself from these various methods and forms of history; moreover, without the questions that I was asked,’ without the difficulties that arose, without the objections that were made, I may never have gained so clear a view of the enterprise to which I am now inextricably linked. Hence the cautious, stumbling manner of this text: at every turn, it stands back, measures up what is before it, gropes towards its limits, stumbles against what it does not mean, and digs pits to mark out its own path. At every turn, it denounces any possible confusion. It rejects its identity, without previously stating: I am neither this nor that. It is not critical, most of the time; it is not a way of saying that everyone else ‘ is wrong. It is an attempt to define a particular site by the exteriority of its vicinity; rather than trying to reduce others to silence, by claiming that what they say is worthless, I have tried to define this blank space from which I speak, and which is slowly taking shape in a discourse that I still feel to be so precarious and so unsure. ‘Aren’t you sure of what you’re saying? Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections are not really directed at the place from which you, are speaking? Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you’re now doing: no, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?’ ‘What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.’

After reading this brief excerpt from Foucault’s approach to history, how do you feel about his assertion that there are no stable facts, that history is essentially like any other text that we can deconstruct? Is there such a thing as “objective” or “true” history? Why or why not? How does this approach compare with what you learned about deconstruction in our previous section?

Scholar Jean Howard has said of the historical/biographical criticism (which we studied in part one) that it depends on three assumptions:

• “history is knowable”;
• “literature mirrors…or reflects historical reality”;
• “historians and critics can see the facts objectively” (Howard 18).

Foucault and the New Historicists reject these three assumptions.

Cultural Studies: From “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular'” by Stuart Hall

Now let’s look at an example of Cultural Studies criticism: Stuart Hall’s “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular.'” Hall, a Jamaican-born cultural theorist and sociologist, was one of the founders of British Cultural Studies. He explored the process of encoding and decoding that accompanies any interaction readers have with a text. When Hall talks about “periodisation” in the passage below, he is discussing historians’ and literary theorists’ attempts to classify works through “periods” (e.g., the English Romantic poets; the Bloomsbury Group , etc.). Hall extends this difficulty to the phrase “popular culture,” which is often used in cultural studies criticism.

First, I want to say something about periodisations in the study of popular culture. Difficult problems are posed here by periodization—I don’t offer it to you simply as a sort of gesture to the historians. Are the major breaks largely descriptive? Do they arise largely from within popular culture itself, or from factors which are outside of but impinge on it? With what other movements and periodisations is “popular culture” most revealingly linked? Then I want to tell you some of the difficulties I have with the term “popular.” I have almost as many problems with “popular” as I have with “culture.” When you put the two terms together the difficulties can be pretty horrendous. Throughout the long transition into agrarian capitalism and then in the formation and development of industrial capitalism, there is a more or less continuous struggle over the culture of working people, the labouring classes and the poor. This fact must be the starting point for any study, both of the basis for, and of the transformations of, popular culture. The changing balance and relations of social forces throughout that history revealed themselves, time and again, in struggles over the forms of the culture, traditions and ways of life of the popular classes. Capital had a stake in the culture of the popular classes because the constitution of a whole new social order around capital required a more or less continuous, if intermittent, process of re-education, in the broadest sense. And one of the principal sites of resistance to the forms through which this “reformation” of the people was pursued lay in popular tradition. That is why popular culture is linked, for so long, to questions of tradition, of traditional forms of life, and why its “traditionalism” has been so often misinterpreted as a product of a merely conservative impulse, backward-looking and anachronistic. Struggle and resistance—but also, of course, appropriation and ex -propriation. Time and again, what we are really looking at is the active destruction of particular ways of life, and their transformation into something new. “Cultural change” is a polite euphemism for the process by which some cultural forms and practices are driven out of the centre of popular life, actively marginalised. Rather than simply “falling into disuse” through the Long March to modernization, things are actively pushed aside, so that something else can take their place. The magistrate and the evangelical police have, or ought to have, a more “honoured” place in the history of popular culture than they have usually been accorded. Even more important than ban and proscription is that subtle and slippery customer—“reform” (with all the positive and unambiguous overtones it carries today). One way or another, “the people” are frequently the object of “reform”: often, for their own good, of course—in their “best interest.” We understand struggle and resistance, nowadays, rather better than we do reform and transformation. Yet “transformations” are at the heart of the study of popular culture. I mean the active work on existing traditions and activities, their active reworking, so that they come out a different way: they appear to “persist”— yet, from one period to another, they come to stand in a different relation to the ways working people live and the ways they define their relations to each other, to “the others” and to their conditions of life. Transformation is the key to the long and protracted process of the “moralization” of the labouring classes, and the “demoralization” of the poor, and the “re-education” of the people. Popular culture is neither, in a “pure” sense, the popular traditions of resistance to these processes; nor is it the forms which are superimposed on and over them. It is the ground on which the transformations are worked. In the study of popular culture, we should always start here: with the double stake in popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it.

Now that you’ve read examples of scholarship from these two approaches, what similarities and differences do you see? Despite significant overlaps—both approaches consider power structures and view texts as artifacts, for example—Cultural Studies tends to have a broader scope, incorporating insights from various cultural disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. New Historicism focuses more specifically on the interplay between literature and history. Additionally, Cultural Studies may engage more directly with contemporary cultural and political issues, while New Historicism tends to focus on historical periods and their relevance to understanding literature.

How to Use New Historicism and Cultural Studies as  Critical Approaches

When using a New Historicism or cultural studies approach to analyze a literary text, you should consider the connections between the text and its historical context. With cultural studies, you will also consider how the text influenced and was influenced by popular culture, and how the text’s reception changed over time. You can do this in a variety of ways. Here are a few approaches you might consider. Some of them such as author background, reader response, and identifying power dynamics will feel familiar to you from previous chapters.

• Research the Historical Context: Investigate the time period in which the literary work was written. Explore political events, social structures, economic conditions, and cultural movements.
• Author’s Background: Examine the life and background of the author. Consider their personal experiences, beliefs, and the historical events that may have influenced them.
• Identify Power Dynamics: Analyze power relationships within the text and in the historical context. Consider issues of class, gender, race, and other forms of social hierarchy.
• Interdisciplinary Approach: Draw on insights from various disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, and political science to enrich your understanding of the historical and cultural context.
• Cultural Artifacts: Treat the literary work as a cultural artifact. Identify elements within the text that reflect or respond to the cultural values, norms, and anxieties of the time.
• Dialogues with Other Texts: Explore how the literary work engages with other texts, both literary and non-literary. Look for intertextual references and consider how the work contributes to broader cultural conversations (the discourse Foucault talks about).
• Language and Literary Techniques: Analyze the language, narrative structure, and formal elements of the text. Consider how these literary techniques contribute to the overall meaning and how they may be influenced by or respond to historical factors.
• Ideological Critique: Investigate the ideologies present in the text and how they align with or challenge the dominant ideologies of the historical period. Consider the ways in which literature participates in ideological struggles. We will explore more specific examples of how to do this when we focus on Marxism and Postcolonial Studies in our next section.
• Social and Cultural Constructs: Examine how social and cultural constructs are represented in the text. This includes exploring representations of identity, social norms, and cultural practices.
• Historical Events and Allusions: Identify direct or indirect references to historical events within the text. Consider how the events are portrayed and what commentary they offer on the historical moment.
• Historical Change and Continuity: Assess how the text reflects or responds to processes of historical change and continuity. Consider whether the text aligns with or challenges prevailing attitudes and structures.
• Reader Response: Reflect on how the historical context might shape the way readers interpret and respond to the text. Consider how the meaning of the text may evolve across different historical and cultural contexts.

You do not need to consider every aspect of the text mentioned above to write an effective New Historicism analysis. You can focus on one or a few of these elements in your approach to the text.

As noted above, a cultural studies critical approach is similar to New Historicism but focuses more on the text as it is received in a particular culture, with more emphasis on intersectionality. A cultural studies approach may consider a variety of artifacts in addition to literary texts (such as film and other media) for analysis. A cultural studies approach might also consider how cultural influences, receptions, and attitudes have changed over time.

Let’s look at how do do these types of criticism by applying New Historicism to a text.

Applying New Historicism Techniques to Literature

As with our other critical approaches, we will start with  a close reading of the poem below (we’ll do this together in class or as part of the recorded lecture for this chapter). After you complete your close reading of the poem and find evidence from the text, you’ll need to look outside the text for additional information to place the poem in its context. I have provided some additional resources to demonstrate how you might do this. Looking at the text within its context will help you to formulate a thesis statement that makes an argument about the text, using New Historicism as your critical method.

“Lament for Dark Peoples”

I was a red man one time, But the white men came. I was a black man, too, But the white men came.

They drove me out of the forest. They took me away from the jungles. I lost my trees. I lost my silver moons.

Now they’ve caged me In the circus of civilization. Now I herd with the many— Caged in the circus of civilization.

The first thing we need to know is more about Langston Hughes as a poet. Who was he? When did he write? What was the cultural context for his writing? We can go to Wikipedia as a starting point for our research, but we should not cite Wikipedia. Instead, we will want to find higher-quality literary scholarship to use in our analysis.

The open source article “ Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language” by Christine Dualé informs us that “Hughes gained his reputation as a “jazz poet” during the jazz era or Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s” ( Dualé 1). Dualé quotes a study of Black poets during the Harlem Renaissance that provides some context for this poem: “Many black intellects were disquieted by the white vogue for blackness. They recognized how frivolous and temporal it was, and the extent to which their culture was being admired for all the ‘primitive’ qualities from which they wished to be distanced” ( Dualé quoting Archer Straw). 

This quote helps us to understand lines 9-12 of the poem, where Hughes describes the “circus of civilization” that he felt under the gaze of this “white vogue for blackness.”

In considering the question of social constructs and power dynamics during this period, we need to know more about the Harlem Renaissance, preferably looking for contemporary sources that describe this period. JSTOR is a good database for this type of research. I limit my search by year to get five results, and I choose an article from Alain Locke (in part, because I already know enough about the Harlem Renaissance to know that Locke was an important part of it—it’s totally acceptable to use your own existing knowledge of the historical context, if you have it, to guide your research!).

When I read “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature,” written by Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke in 1928,  I quickly find the prevailing social construct that the dominant intellectual culture at the time (white American men) had formed about African American writers during the period when this poem was written. I have quoted from the first page of the article below:

THERE are two distinctive elements in the cultural background of the American Negro: one, his primitive tropical heritage, however vague and clouded over that may be, and second, the specific character of the Negro group experience in America both with respect to group history and with regard to unique environing social conditions. As an easily discriminable minority, these conditions are almost inescapable for all sections of the Negro population, and function, therefore, to intensify emotionally and intellectually group feelings, group reactions, group traditions. Such an accumulating body of collective experience inevitably matures into a group culture which just as inevitably finds some channels of unique expression, and this has been and will be the basis of the Negro’s characteristic expression of himself in American life. In fact, as it matures to conscious control and intelligent use, what has been the Negro’s social handicap and class liability will very likely become his positive group capital and cultural asset. Certainly whatever the Negro has produced thus far of distinctive worth and originality has been derived in the main from this source, with the equipment from the general stock of American culture acting at times merely as the precipitating agent; at others, as the working tools of this creative expression (Locke 234).

In reading this article, it’s important to note that the author, Alain Locke, is  a noted African American scholar and writer and the first African American to win a prestigious Rhodes scholarship. He is widely considered to be one of the principal architects of the Harlem Renaissance. What does this passage tell us about the social constructs and contemporary views of African Americans in the late 1920s, when Langston Hughes wrote “Lament for Dark Peoples”? What important historical context seems to be “missing” or glossed over from this cultural description of African Americans in the 1920s? Hint: It’s only 60 years since President Lincolin signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and yet we see no explicit mention of slavery here.

Now to consider how history and context changes, I might also look for a contemporary appraisal of Langston Hughes’s work in the context of the Harlem Renaissance.

Again, I do a JSTOR search, limiting to articles from 2018 through 2023. I get 157 results using the same search terms. Clearly, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance are playing a prominent role in our contemporary scholarly discourse, especially in the fields of literature, history, and cultural studies. In fact, there’s even a journal called The Langston Hughes Review ! I choose an article from this journal entitled “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Remembering Langston Hughes: His Art, Life, and Legacy Fifty Years Later” by Wallace Best, Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University.

In this article, I get some corroboration for what my search results have already told me: “Langston Hughes, one of the principal writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, is having a renaissance all his own” (Best 1).

Best goes on to demonstrate how Langston Hughes’s role in our culture has shifted since his death:

“There is good reason for all this attention. Arguably one of the most significant writers in United States history, Hughes has left an indelible mark, culturally and politically, on American society. Hailed in his lifetime mainly as the “Poet Laureate of the African American community,” he is now generally embraced as one of the most important poets speaking to, and on behalf of, all Americans. Since his death in May 1967, his writing, particularly his poetry, has been invoked to articulate both our loftiest hopes and our deepest fears as a nation. Seldom has there been a national crisis or an important political event in the United States over the last half-century in which his work has not been recounted. Speakers from across the social, ideological, and political spectrum, from Tim Kaine, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry to Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama have cited Hughes’s powerful compositions. His poetry has helped to shape our country’s thinking about itself, our often-troubled past, and our continuing hope for a brighter, more enlightened future.”

With these three external sources and the original poem, I can now begin to think about the kind of thesis statement I want to write.

Example of a New Historicism thesis statement: In one of his earlier poems, “Lament for Dark Peoples,” African American poet Langston Hughes makes a powerful argument against the “circus of [white] civilization (line 12), demonstrating how the cultural norms toward marginalized peoples in place during the early twentieth century damaged all Americans.

I would then use the evidence from the poem as one cultural artifact, including the additional sources I found to provide more context for when the poem was written, the social constructs and power dynamics in place at that time, and the shifts in culture that have now made Langston Hughes a poet for “all Americans” (Best 1).

With New Historicism, because we are considering the context, we must cite some outside sources in addition to the text itself. Here are the sources I cited in this section:

Works Cited

Best, Wallace. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Remembering Langston Hughes: His Art, Life, and Legacy Fifty Years Later.” The Langston Hughes Review , vol. 25, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–5. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.5325/langhughrevi.25.1.0001 . Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

Dualé, Christine. “Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language.”  Angles. New Perspectives on the Anglophone World 7 (2018). https://journals.openedition.org/angles/920  . Accessed 3 Oct. 2023. Locke, Alain. “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , vol. 140, 1928, pp. 234–47. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/1016852 . Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

One additional note: depending on your approach, it would also be appropriate to borrow research techniques from historians for a New Historicism analysis. This might involve working with archive primary source documents. One example of this type of document that I found in my research on the Harlem Renaissance is this one from the U.S. Library of Congress entitled “The Whites Invade Harlem.”

As noted above, a cultural studies approach would be similar to a New Historicism approach. However, if I were using cultural studies, I might want to focus on the difference between the text’s critical reception when it was published (how it affected and was affected by the discourse in the 1920s) and the text’s critical reception today, focusing on the explosion of academic interest on Langston Hughes’s work in since 2018. I would then look at the particular aspects of culture, such as the election of America’s first Black president and the backlash this created in popular culture, as well as the focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia and how this was reflected in popular culture. For example, I could consider how twenty-first century scholarship focusing on Langston Hughes is one example of a larger desire for inclusion and representation of marginalized groups in literature, what we sometimes refer to as “exploding the canon” (Renza 257).

Limitations of New Historicism and Cultural Studies Criticism

While New Historicism offers valuable insights into the interconnectedness of literature and historical context, it also has its limitations. Here are some potential drawbacks:

• Relativism: New Historicism can sometimes be accused of cultural relativism, as it emphasizes understanding a text within its specific historical context. This might lead to a reluctance to make broader judgments about the quality or significance of a work across different times and cultures.
• Overemphasis on Power Relations: Critics argue that New Historicism can place an excessive focus on power dynamics and political aspects, potentially neglecting other important elements of literary analysis, such as aesthetics or individual authorial intentions.
• Determinism: There’s a risk of determinism in assuming that a text is entirely shaped by its historical context. This approach may downplay the agency of individual authors and the role of artistic creativity in shaping literature.
• Selective Use of History: Scholars employing New Historicism may selectively use historical evidence to support their interpretations, potentially overlooking contradictory historical data or alternative perspectives that challenge their readings (don’t do this!)
• Overlooking Textual Autonomy/Author Authority: Critics argue that New Historicism sometimes neglects the autonomy of literary texts, treating them primarily as reflections of historical conditions rather than as creative and independent entities with their own internal dynamics.
• Tendency for Presentism: There’s a risk of imposing contemporary values and perspectives onto historical texts, leading to anachronistic interpretations that may not accurately reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the time in which the work was created (note how I initially looked for scholarship from the time period of the text I was analyzing above).

These limitations do not mean we shouldn’t use New Historicism; rather, they suggest areas where a more balanced and comprehensive approach to literary analysis may be necessary.

Similarly, cultural studies might place an overwhelming emphasis on cultural factors, sometimes neglecting economic or political considerations that could also shape social dynamics. The relativist stance of cultural studies may hinder critical evaluation and potentially overlook harmful practices or ideologies.

New Historicism and Cultural Criticism Scholars

New historicism.

• Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher who viewed history as a text that could be deconstructed. Foucault’s concept of “the discourse” is essential to both New Historicism and Cultural Studies criticism.
• Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943) is the American Shakespeare scholar who coined the term “New Historicism.”

Cultural Studies

• Stuart Hall (1932-2014) was a Jamaican-born British philosopher and cultural theorist whose ideas were influential to the development of cultural studies as a field.
• Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German philosopher and thinker whose ideas about media were foundational to cultural studies.
• Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher and critic who focused on the importance of context over text in approaches to literary works.
• Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French philosopher whose 1967 essay “L’Morte de Auteur” critiqued traditional biographical approaches to literary criticism.

Further Reading

• Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” Thinking Photography  (1982): 15-31.
• Brannigan, John.  New Historicism and Cultural Materialism . Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
• Coates, Christopher. “What was the New Historicism?” The Centennial Review , vol. 37, no. 2, 1993, pp. 267–80. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/23739388. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Cotten, Angela L., and Christa Davis Acampora, eds.  Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women’s Writings . State University of New York Press, 2012.
• Dollimore, Jonathan. “Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism.” New Historicism and Renaissance Drama . Routledge, 2016. 45-56.
• Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt.  Practicing New Historicism . University of Chicago Press, 2000.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. “Racial Memory and Literary History.” PMLA , vol. 116, no. 1, 2001, pp. 48–63. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/463640. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. “What Is the History of Literature?” Critical Inquiry , vol. 23, no. 3, 1997, pp. 460–81. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344030. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Hall, Stuart. “Encoding and decoding in the television discourse.” .https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/history/cccs/stencilled-occasional-papers/1to8and11to24and38to48/SOP07.pdf
• Hall, Stuart. “Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies.”  Stuart Hall . Routledge, 2006. 272-285.
• Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Foucault and the New Historicism.” American Literary History , vol. 3, no. 2, 1991, pp. 360–75. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/490057. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Hoover, Dwight W. “The New Historicism.” The History Teacher , vol. 25, no. 3, 1992, pp. 355–66. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/494247. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Howard, Jean E. “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies.” English Literary Renaissance  16.1 (1986): 13-43.
• Porter, Carolyn. “History and Literature: ‘After the New Historicism.’” New Literary History , vol. 21, no. 2, 1990, pp. 253–72. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/469250. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Renza, Louis A. “Exploding Canons.” Contemporary Literature , vol. 28, no. 2, 1987, pp. 257–70. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/1208391 . Accessed 13 Feb. 2024.
• Ryan, Kiernan. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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151 interesting cultural analysis topics for students.

October 6, 2021

As a broad concept, cultural analysis is an area of study that looks at the social and cultural aspects of everyday living and life in general. It focuses on the analysis of all the ways we develop interactions and relations with human society.

When writing a cultural analysis paper, students should remember that it affords them an excellent opportunity to explore various experiences through their chosen cultural themes.

Students are often assigned cultural analysis paper writing in school because it serves to conduct extensive research. Through selected topics and research, students are enabled with the ability to analyze global topics, investigate topics on various issues, as well as to understand the significance of different cultural backgrounds.

When assigned to write a cultural analysis essay, the first approach is to research topics filled with rich experiences and ideas, as this gives you room for so many things to write on. While writing your cultural essay, your abstract, introduction, main body, and conclusions are relevant. For more context, your article has to be detailed, flowing seamlessly for easy reading and understanding.

Interesting Analytical Essay Topics for Students

When writing an analytical essay paper, emphasis is paid majorly on the topic you are selecting because your topic affords you the level of depth necessary to carry out the needed analysis. Analytical topics writing demands interesting analytical topics to come out well. Here are some analytical essay topics to consider for your essay writing assignment:

• Analyze the impact of religion on our thinking and perception of life
• Analyze the core distinction between Islam and Christianity
• Write extensively on the health importance of Marijuana
• How is technology influencing human inertia
• What is the cultural symbolism of Halloween
• Analyze the effect of the Spooky season over time
• Explore the origin story of Halloween
• Explore the social impacts of religious doctrines and how it impedes growth
• Analyze the limitations of spiritual principles and how they negatively impact social life
• Analyze the importance of self-care practice to developing one’s mental health
• Analyze the effect on cultural differences and how it affects people’s perception of various subjects
• Analyze fast fashion as an unsustainable social lifestyle
• Effects of fast fashion on an economy
• Explore ways through which the social impact of fast fashion can be curbed
• Analyze the importance of therapy and why it’s essential for better mental health
• What factors promote peace and unity in multicultural states
• Why does Christianity frown on intermarriage between Christians and Muslims
• Exploring the limiting social and cultural beliefs of Christianity
• Exploring the cultural limitation of religion
• Analyze in well-constructed details the modern-day effects of slavery
• Analyze how technology is taking over the educational sector
• Explore the benefits of marketing beyond digital marketing

Critical Analysis Essay Topics for College Essays

There is a significant distinction between analysis paper topics and critical analysis topics. It is in its complexity. Your analysis topic changes shape the moment it requires you to carry out criticism. In this situation, your work on the topic moves beyond analyzing the work but also mirroring your work from a critical lens. In your critical analysis essay, you are not just exploring but picking up salient points and facts to help you form a solid judgment.

• Exploring in detail the inherent racism of the Olympics
• Exploring misogyny, misogynoir and racism in the entertainment industry
• A critical outlook structural racism
• Ways through which the implementation of gender roles confines genders in boxes
• A look into how excessive video game impacts health
• Exploring how video games influence children’s mental health
• A look into addiction, how it affects a system, and possible ways through which it can be curbed
• An exploration on how technology impacts educational growth
• Critically evaluate the pros and cons of the gradual decline of traditional learning and the burgeoning development of online learning
• Assess the benefits of single-parent families
• Critically evaluating the effects of global warming
• A look into how social media promotes freedom of speech
• Exploring in detail the importance of virtual communities
• Atheism: a form of religion on its own?
• Veganism and its social effect on healthy living
• Anti-drug campaign and the study of drug abuse and addiction
• Critical research on the concept of body positivity
• Interracial marriages and the origin of its social perception
• Inter-religious marriage and the challenges associated with it
• Study into the inherent nature of homophobia in the human society
• A study into how homophobia and religion connect
• The distinction between the positive and negative impacts of social media in young adults.

Good Cultural Criticism Essay Topics to Explore

As an integral part of human living, culture is multifaceted. What this entails in any essay writing or criticism through a cultural lens is that there are many subjects to touch on. To conduct and write a good essay on this topic, attention should be drawn towards exploring the complexity of culture and the various dimensions of living. Here are some cultural criticism topics to look into:

• The history of racism and how it has continued to affect healthy coexistence in Western societies
• Understanding the limitations of religion
• A look into the distinction between spirituality and religion
• A study of the history of the Olympics and its impacts on sports over the years
• A survey of literature and how it impacts various aspects of human lives
• Critical analysis on the subject of black hair
• How safe abortion ban translates to dictatorship
• Dictatorial tendencies prevalent with Western philosophies and ideas
• The cultural impact of Brexit on Europe
• The cultural impact of Brexit on the United Kingdom
• Critically evaluating structural racism in the workplace
• A study of overt and implicit racism
• Analyzing the influence of colonial rule on Africa
• How imperialism morphs into new slavery
• Exploring the concept of ethnicity
• The cultural impact of literature
• Analyzing the role of literature in shaping human consciousness
• A study of misogyny and how it affects human relationships
• Analysis of the cultural aspects within the literature
• A study of the importance of situating a literary work within a cultural context
• Importance of cultural context in writing
• Exploring literature from a cultural lens

Controversial Cultural Analysis Essay Topics

Your cultural analysis essay topics will differ slightly from your critical analysis topic. Unlike your critical analysis paper, the cultural analysis only requires that you situate your topic within a cultural context and does not require the bringing up and exploration of facts. It just simply requires you to analyze your topic within a cultural context.

• Discuss the impacts of Interracial marriages
• Discuss the strength and weaknesses of inter-religious marriages
• A study on the popularity of Tiktok today
• A study on how Tiktok culture has influenced music promotion
• How Tiktok and Instagram Reels is rewriting the terms of social engagement
• Does social media have an impact on culture?
• The cultural effect of fast fashion culture
• A study of the social preference of Ape products
• A study on the weakness and strengths of Apple products
• What Apple products have to say about capitalism
• The effects of television on society
• How Television sitcoms have effects on culture
• A discussion on how TV builds and promotes the culture
• The importance of representation in popular culture
• The influence of classical literature on life to date
• The cultural impacts of social media trends
• Effects of classical movies today
• Social media blackout: How social media blackout has been ingrained into society
• A cultural analysis of social media in creating bandwagons
• Exploring the impact of psychology on culture
• The cultural implications of following trends
• Elaborate on social media herd culture

Exceptional Literary Analysis Essay Topics for your Quality Essays

Just like in culture analysis essay topics, in literary analysis essay topics, the goal is to situate your essay topic within an academic context. It means that what you’re writing and what you’re going to write on must be drawn from a literary work. Here are some topics that fit within the category:

• A study of the symbolic nature of the “green light” in the Great Gatsby
• Understanding ethnicity within literary work of Langston Hughes
• The cultural impact of James Baldwin’s literary works
• The Harlem Renaissance literature and how it shaped the future of literature in America
• The symbolic depiction of the title “The Invisible Man” from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
• Discuss Queerness through the study of Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
• An intensive review of the negro movement through the works of W.E.B Dubois.
• A comprehensive literary analysis of Double Consciousness by W.E.B Du Bois
• From a cultural perspective, a literary analysis of Audre Lorde’s collection of essays I am your Sister
• The continued relevance of Jane Austen’s literary works to date
• A realistic study of D.H Lawerence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
• Explore the concept of realism and romanticism in the novel Jane Eyre
• The social relevance of James Baldwin’s Just Above my Head
• Social implications of Toni Morrison’s Sula
• An overview of the racist connotation in Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
• Detail how The Great Gatsby pictures came to be in the 1920s America.
• A cultural analysis of Bell Hooks All About Love
• The cultural impact of black literature
• A literary study of Samuel Selvon’s Ways of Sunlight
• A cultural analysis of Edwidge Danticat’s Breathe, Eyes, Memory
• The Societal relevance of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women

Textual Analysis Essay Topics on Engrossing Subjects

A textual analysis essay looks into the analysis of the writing technique of an author. The student pays attention to the language of the literary work and, in turn, draws out ideas from it to elaborate on the inherent message of the work or how the author’s language influences ideas. All of this is done using the student’s thoughts. Here are some topics within this category.

• Analyze the plays written by William Shakespeare
• Analyze the recurring theme within the various works of James Baldwin
• Discuss the theme of “the American Dream” that is prevalent within The Great Gatsby
• The theme of race and hardship in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun
• The theme of a quest for belonging in Langston Hughes’s poem I Too
• A textual analysis of James Baldwin’s Another Country
• The exploration of the effects of racism in James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain
• A study on the subject of marriage in the 19 century through Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
• Write a textual essay on any literary work of choice
• Write a textual analysis of any artwork of choice
• Analyze the characters in Baldwin’s Another Country
• A textual analysis of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
• A textual analysis essay on the New Testament
• Analyze the characterization in any selected literary text of choice
• Write an analysis of any of Obama’s past speeches
• A textual reading of the work of Alice walker
• A study of the writing style and identity representation in Toni Morrison’s works.
• The use of language to draw attention in Toni Morrison’s novels
• The use of language to compel action in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance
• Write an essay on the importance of Zora Neale Hurston’s works
• A textual study of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time

Critical Response Essay Topics for Study

A critical response essay is a more in-depth version of a textual analysis essay. Although you’re summarizing and analyzing the author’s works, at the same time, you’re making critical remarks and arguments through the various points you earn by highlighting outstanding things from the work. Here are some of them:

• Jane Austen literature is as relevant today as in the 19th century
• A study of salient points highlighted from Baldwin’s essay The Fire Next Time
• Write a critical personal response to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
• Write a critical personal analysis on selected Obama’s speeches.
• Using contemporary measures in the study of The Merchant of Venice
• Critical analysis of Alice Walker’s inclusion of lesbianism in The Colour Purple
• The portrayal of society in Oliver Twist
• The exploration of human desires in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
• A response to the depiction of black lives in Mister Johnson
• How care is portrayed in Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals
• A critical analysis of Audre Lorde’s poem “A Litany for Survival.”
• A critical overview of the role of art in human lives
• A study of how literature influences the perception of reality
• An analysis of the cultural context of literary works
• A critical response to the need for representation in literature
• The impact of art on revolution
• A critical study of revolutionary art
• An analysis of identity politics in literature
• Study of race relation in The Fence
• A critical overview of Toni Morrison’s Beloved
• The study of the cultural impact of revolutionary literature.

Need Help With You Cultural Analysis Assignment?

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

Author Interviews

Legendary editor marty baron describes his 'collision of power' with trump and bezos.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.