No Judgement - On Being Critical

As a critic, Lauren Oyler has spent a lot of time writing essays that attempt to convince an audience to pay attention to something that could easily be called irrelevant: usually a book. But how do we decide what does matter? If not caring about anything pegs you as a retrograde nihilist, caring too much, about the wrong things, is, at best, embarrassing and uncool; at worst, it may be immoral. What obsesses us is "real" and significant, but the contours of that significance are often blurry; it is easy to confuse care with importance, importance with obligation, particularly when there are apparently rewards for doing so. In this collection of interlinked essays, Oyler explores various modern phenomena - from online arguments, the popularity of #MeToo, autofiction, reality TV, fake news and conspiracy theories - to show how ideas about what is and is not important have shaped culture, how irrelevance can provide freedom as well as madness, and how caring or not caring is rarely a straightforward enterprise.

Product details

• Authors: LAUREN OYLER, Lauren Oyler
• Publisher: Virago Press Ltd
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 29.02.2024
• EAN: 9780349016504
• ISBN: 978-0-349-01650-4
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 230 mm x 26 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays, Literary essays