{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025985663082437275, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.970588235294118, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Arts Criticism Course Focuses on Experiential Learning

My own lecture on live theater, while pointing up its fundamental differences from film, tries to show that Goethe’s three questions still apply. The critic is simply asking them within another aesthetic framework, in which deliberate stage artifice and “theatricality,” quite unlike the realism of film, may be “what the artist is trying to achieve.” A lecture on food criticism warns students against condemning a dish simply because it isn’t to their taste. It is necessary to know first what the chef is “trying to achieve,” with what ingredients, to judge the results fairly. Then there is the problem of applying Goethe’s guidelines when the work of art is simply too far outside conventional experience for one to know the artist’s intent. To illustrate one reviewer’s solution, I display a New Yorker review of an experimental Japanese dance-mime performance, in which the critic admits his ignorance, avoids speculation on the show’s “meaning” and relies on sensory reporting to convey the performance’s effect. Because most students plan to use their new skills, even on the smalltown papers where most will have their first jobs, we deal also with more prosaic concerns: How does one talk the local movie exhibitor into holding screenings? What if your publisher demands a rave notice of his daughter’s piano recital? Can you denounce the food at the local cafe without risking libel? Guest speakers addressing such questions include my own department’s ethics and media law professors and reviewers for the local daily and the Des Moines Register. But the essence of the course remains the writing of reviews and their subjection to painstaking scrutiny to see if they meet Goethe’s guidelines. Whether or not the student reviewer’s conclusion is “right” is perhaps as irrelevant as it is unknowable. (When is a critic “right?” When is an editorial writer or a columnist “right?”) What can be known is whether the student’s work reveals sound reporting and clearheaded logic set out in vigorous English. The progress students make between that chaotic first day and the end of the course suggests that the craft of reviewing for the mass media is indeed teachable.