"The Critic's "I

Criticism is subject to a peculiar kind of failure: namely, that the reader comes to think the critic herself doesn't see the object the way she claims; that in fact, such a way of seeing doesn't exist. Where this kind of failure is possible, it follows that the critic's first-person viewpoint, her I , has an integral role to play in the critical act. Drawing on the aesthetic theories of Stanley Cavell and Hannah Arendt, this essay argues for the central theoretical importance of staging a first person language, or idiolect , in criticism

Art · Philosophy and Literary Analysis · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications