Authority

A galaxy-brain-level thinker Torrey PetersSince her canonical essay On Liking Women, the Pulitzer Prizewinning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers.Authority brings together Chus critical work across a wide range of medianovels, television, theater, video gamesas well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+. As a critic, Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butlers science fiction as a parable of slavery teases out the ideology behind Hillary Clintons fictional sex life and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism.The unifying theme of the book is authority and taste in literature, art, culture and politics: how do we decide whats good, and how do we convince others that our judgement is correct?