LLSW4401

This course will engage students in an examination of lineaments of critical arts writing and a practice of their critical writing on the arts. Class meetings will combine discussion and workshop. Over a semester we will read essays that consider six art forms - literature; film; music (classical jazz and popular); theater and performance; visual art; and dance – and critique each other’s essays on the same art forms. Throughout the course we will study strategies by which a critic establishes a voice and persona, using clear, vivid and swift kinetic prose. Criticism is a tradition to which contemporary students get little exposure nowadays: acts of taking apart its components - and putting them back together in each new essay - offer a particular set of writing challenges that no other form can offer. A critic must blend the subjective and objective, must know the past history of an artwork, must place it as well in the contemporary landscape. Critics must be able to probe their own convictions and emotions in the course of writing about artifacts supposedly independent of them. We will give our last weeks to essays that explore what one might call “critical histories and cultural boundaries.” Writers examined will include professional critics such as Pauline Kael, Otis Ferguson, V.S. Pritchett, Dave Hickey, Susan Sontag and John Berger, but also belle-lettrist, poetry and writers who’ve written criticism too, such as Colette, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Katherine Anne Porter, Rainer Maria Rilke, C.L.R James, Zadie Smith, Maggie Nelson. Seniors/Juniors only. Juniors must obtain permission from instructor.