Criticism
Novelist and critic Dale Peck unfavorably reviewed Moody's The Black Veil in The New Republic, a review so harsh it has become infamous in literary circles. Peck began the review with the sentence "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation," arguing that Moody's writing is "pretentious, muddled, derivative, bathetic" and claiming, "I am not convinced that Moody's books are about anything at all."
Read more about this topic: Rick Moody
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“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)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Good criticism is very rare and always precious.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)