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Authority: Essays
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About This Book
A bold, provocative collection of essays on one of the most urgent questions of our What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything? Since her canonical 2017 essay "On Liking Women," the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers. Authority brings together Chu's critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. As a critic, Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama; questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butler's science fiction as a parable of slavery; teases out the ideology behind Hillary Clinton's (fictional) sex life; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism. Criticism is in a crisis of authority—or rather, that's what critics have been saying ever since the Enlightenment. In a magisterial new essay, Chu offers a revised intellectual history of this supposed crisis, tracing the surprisingly political contours of criticism from its origins in eighteenth-century aesthetics all the way to its present form in the age of social media. Rather than succumbing to an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the genuine crises, from authoritarianism to genocide, that confront us today.
Reviews
"You could easily focus on the joy of viciousness in these reviews...but better yet is to focus on how worthwhile it is to place our favorite things within a larger context."
"What a strange book Authority, by Andrea Long Chu, is—brilliant, blind ..."
"Long Chu insists that critics should abandon their desire to obtain authority, but she's seemingly not all that interested in the vast tradition outside liberal criticism that already does this ..."
"Funnily enough, one of the sharpest and most consistent ideas that surfaces in Chu's work concerns the relative impotence of ideas when they are forced to compete with the superior pull of desire."
"Chu is an insightful writer with a sharp eye and little tolerance for hypocrisy."
"This is the striking thing about Long Chu's authorial tone: she combines the expert and the naif in a single voice, which chimes with a similar dualism in her reader."
"Acerbic social and cultural critique."
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