The New Criterion, edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer, has been a leading voice in America’s cultural life since its founding in 1982. In a bracing collection of essays taken from the magazine’s pages, Counterpoints covers The New Criterion’s achievement on the occasion of its twenty-fifth year of publication.
Counterpoints offers a generous sampling of The New Criterion’s response to the cultural challenges and opportunities of our times, a response that has been organized under the rubrics “Determinations,” Contentions,” “Recuperations,” and “Discriminations.” Taken together, the essays in this volume aspire to live up to T. S. Eliot’s definition of the vocationof criticism as “the common pursuit of true judgment.” Counterpoints is a wide-ranging record of The New Criterion’s contribution to this imperative task.
Twenty-five years is an impressive milestone for any “little magazine:" Eliot’s Criterion, from which The New Criterion takes its name and editorial inspiration, ran for only 17 years. It is not merely in terms of longevity that The New Criterion is impressive, however. What is really worth celebrating is the substance of the magazine: its impact on the most pressing issues in culture and the arts, and its incisive writing on painting, music, dance, education, literature, media, theater, and other arts. The magazine also has maintained a unique position in championing the values of high modernism in an age of so-called “postmodernism.”
Counterpoints is published by Ivan R. Dee (Chicago) and is available for purchase from Amazon.com.
Reviewers may contact Ellie Thermansen for advance copies by email at ellie@newcriterion.com.
add a comment