Acultural critic is acritic of a givenculture, usually as a whole. Cultural criticism has significant overlap withsocial andcultural theory. While suchcriticism is simply part of theself-consciousness of the culture, the social positions of the critics and the medium they use vary widely. The conceptual and political grounding of criticism also changes over time.
Contemporary usage has tended to include all types ofcriticism directed at culture.
The term "cultural criticism" itself has been claimed byJacques Barzun:No such thing was recognized or in favour when we [i.e. Barzun andTrilling] began—more by intuition than design—in the autumn of 1934.[1][2] It has been argued that in theinter-war period, the language ofliterary criticism was adequate for the needs of cultural critics; but that later it mainly servedacademe.[3]Alan Trachtenberg'sCritics of Culture (1976) concentrated on American intellectuals of the 1920s who were "nonacademic" (includingH. L. Mencken andLewis Mumford), where the 1995 collectionAmerican Cultural Critics covered mainly later figures, such asF. O. Matthiessen andSusan Sontag, involved in debates onAmerican culture as national.[4]
In contrast, a work such asRichard Wolin's 1995The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (1995) uses it as a broad-brush description.
Cultural critics came to the scene in the nineteenth century.Matthew Arnold[5] andThomas Carlyle are leading examples of a cultural critic of theVictorian age; in Arnold there is also a concern for religion.John Ruskin was another. Because of an equation made between ugliness of material surroundings and an impoverished life,aesthetes and others might be considered implicitly to be engaging in cultural criticism, but the actual articulation is what makes a critic. In France,Charles Baudelaire was a cultural critic, as wasSøren Kierkegaard in Denmark andFriedrich Nietzsche in Germany.
In the twentieth centuryIrving Babbitt on the right, andWalter Benjamin[6] on the left, might be considered major cultural critics. The field of play has changed considerably, in that thehumanities have broadened to includecultural studies of all kinds, which are grounded incritical theory. This trend is not without its dissidents, however;James Seaton has written extensively in defense of the continued importance of theHumanistic Tradition Irving Babbitt and his heirs championed, while criticizing the dominance ofcritical theory in the teaching of literature.Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent features a collection of essays from prominent English professors, writers and critics stating their disagreement with the prominent role given to critical theory in English departments.
