Academic Animadversions -- For Ph.D.s Only

The material on this site is provided by Ray Carney, an interdisciplinary arts scholar who has written extensively on the relation of American painting, literature, drama, dance, film, and philosophy, and curated museum shows on the relation of the arts.

• Skepticism and Faith: The limitations of ideological approaches to art—excerpts from a review of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
• Looking without Seeing: The limitations of political approaches to art—excerpts from a review of David James's Allegories of Cinema
• The Culture of Irony, Part 1: The limitations of treating art as a form of rhetoric instead of as a form of truth—the example of Mike Leigh
• The Culture of Irony, Part 2: The limitations of treating art as a form of rhetoric instead of as a form of truth—the example of Cassavetes
• Art as a way of knowing—the example of Thomas Eakins
• An interview with Ray Carney about the limitations of Cultural Studies understandings of art
• More about the limitations of Cultural Studies understandings of art—one more glance at David James's work
• Excerpts from two interviews with Ray Carney
  • About teaching art as a way of knowing
  • About how Cassavetes' work violated critical fashions
• Two forms of cinematic modernism—idealist and pragmatic
• The difference between visionary and pragmatic forms of expression in the work of Mike Leigh
• Art and Abstraction—nonconceptual, nonintellectual relations to experience—the limits of metaphoric forms of knowledge
• Art as experience—the limitations of viewing art as a form of knowledge
• Information about Ray Carney's writing on American film, thought, and culture

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