Word: criticism
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...Burns' two-part PBS documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (debuts Jan. 17; check local listings) rediscovers the story of an athlete who not only broke the color line but insisted, to white and black critics, that his color was irrelevant. The title of Blackness--the companion to last year's book of the same name by Geoffrey C. Ward--is no throwaway. Towering and obsidian-dark, Johnson was the kind of black man, critic Stanley Crouch says in the documentary, who makes whites "think they're in the presence of something aboriginal...
Murray left Saturday Night Live in 1980 to become a star in Stripes and a phenomenon in Ghostbusters, movies in which he improvised much of his dialogue. Summarizing these early performances, film critic Pauline Kael wrote that Murray's "patent insincerity makes him the perfect emblematic hero for the stoned era." For a man who wanted to be emblematic of nothing and beholden to no one, Murray must have sensed that he was losing control of what he was trying to project. So, he had agreed to do Ghostbusters only if the studio, Columbia, would finance a remake...
...publishing essays in influential little journals like Partisan Review, she emerged as the intellectual plenipotentiary of American cultural life, militantly contemporary, insatiable in her appetite for culture and truly, madly, deeply conversant with every new development in fiction, philosophy, film and art. With the great turbines of her critical judgment turning, Sontag patrolled the latest edges of world culture, bringing back news of the philosophers Simone Weil and Walter Benjamin, the novelist Witold Gombrowicz, the critic Roland Barthes, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard...
...fine and original short stories and eventually returned to the novel with new juices flowing. In America, her story of a 19th century Polish actress who sets up a utopian commune in California, won the National Book Award in 2000. But it was as a tireless, all-purpose cultural critic that she made her lasting mark. "Sometimes," she once said, "I feel that, in the end, all I am really defending ... is the idea of seriousness, of true seriousness." And in the end, she made us take it seriously...
...DIED. SUSAN SONTAG, 71, prominent critic, novelist and outspoken public intellectual; in New York City. Although she was best known for her works of nonfiction, including Against Interpretation and the critical study On Photography, Sontag wrote fiction (including The Way We Live Now and the best-selling The Volcano Lover), directed films, produced the movie Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, and wrote numerous articles?proving, according to her own definition, that a writer should be "someone who is interested in everything...