Authority (Essays)

A bold, provocative collection of essays on one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?

Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. 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 Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama; questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butler’s science fiction as a parable of slavery; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism.

Criticism today is having a crisis of authority—but so says every generation of critics. In two magisterial new essays, Chu offers a revised intellectual history of this perennial crisis, tracing the surprisingly political contours of criticism from its origins in the Enlightenment to our present age of social media. Rather than succumbing to an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the genuine crises, from authoritarianism to genocide, that confront us today.