Criticism
Pollitt was criticized by Bernard Goldberg, who named her number 74 in his book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, because of her essay "Put Out No Flags," in which she says: "The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war." Goldberg criticized what he perceived to be her lack of patriotism in the time shortly after the September 11th, 2001 attacks.
Pollitt's response, in the Introduction to Virginity or Death!, was "(Memo to self: must try harder.)"
Feminist author Camille Paglia described Pollitt as a "whiny troll, an unscrupulous and unreliable critic and a cultural philistine...She's a good example of the phony prep-school/trust-fund leftism suffusing the incestuously interwined Ivy League cliques who run the corrupt East Coast literary and magazine establishment."
Read more about this topic: Katha Pollitt
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)