Masocriticism

by Paul Mann

These provocative, inventive, and at times outrageous essays on literary theory, philosophy, and cultural criticism describe, in their form and content, the end of criticism, even while performing the endlessness of that endgame. In a sense, the book deconstructs all forms of critique and criticism, including deconstruction, and including its own self. That the book is so painfully aware of the futility of its own enterprise, even while pursuing it relentlessly and with such critical rigor, is what makes this a book of masocriticism as well as about masocriticism.

Genres: Philosophy

312 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1998

About the author

Paul Mann left Poole Grammar School to serve by mistake with 42 Commando. After the Marines he worked in Toronto as an assistant accountant in a bank and left to join the British India Steam Navigation Company where he sailed in many different ships. Once in an oil tanker which circumnavigated the world, and towards the end of his spell at sea, in the Sir Galahad** a Landing Ship Logistic, where life was idyllic. The ship visited exotic ports: the British Virgin Islands, Borneo; and a Bangkok before the tourists arrived. While based in the Far East the ship anchored off tropical beaches while the troops played war games in the jungle.

In educational cruise ships Paul grew to loathe cocktail parties and ritual dining and it had him escaping to collect tickets on a chain ferry that clanked a three minute transit from Sandbanks to Shell Bay in Dorset. There he was the usherette who never got to see the show for Shell Bay was the gateway to a notorious nudist beach.

Paul now lives in Sussex.

His writing has won prizes and has appeared in numerous publications including the Royal Marines Historical Society’s Sheet Anchor, Southern Arts, the Manchester Evening News, Nautical Magazine, Gay Mens Press, Third House, The Marine Society’s The Seafarer…

**The Sir Galahad was sunk as a war grave in the Falkland Islands













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Reviews

[Tony Poerio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mann's writing is impressive.

A key passage regarding Criticism itself:

" Why not decline, not so politely, to participate
in the tiny spectacle of aging intellectuals dressing in
black to prowl festering galleries and clubs where,
sometime before dawn, they will encounter the contemptuous
gaze of their own children, and almost manage to elide that
event when they finally produce their bilious reports,
their chunks of cultural criticism? No excuse, no
justification: all one can put forward is an unendurable
habit of attention, a meager fascination, no more or less
commanding than that hypnosis one enters in the face of
television; a rut that has always led downward and in the
end always found itself stuck on the surface; a kind of
drivenness, if not a drive; a *critique*, if you can
forgive such a word, that has never located any cultural
object whose poverty failed to reflect its own; a rage to
find some point at which criticism would come to an end,
and that only intensified as that end-point receded and
shrunk to the size of an ideal. "

Mann makes the argument that ALL criticism is itself an act of masochism. (So this review would be included. As would all of yours.) But in spite of that, he does it very well. The whole book is absurdly funny, yet intellectually profound.

Somewhat meta, and always very dense, it's a book of most interest to professors or graduate students in Philosophy or Literature. But some of the essays have general appeal as well.


Free online, start here to see if you have a taste for the writing style.
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-onl...