Doreen St. Félix on Using Pop Culture to Consider Society ‹ Literary Hub

The Critic and Her Publics is a live interview series that asks the best and most prominent critics working today to provide on-the-spot critiques of something they’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse of brilliant minds at work, thinking, taking risks, and making spontaneous judgments, sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

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Excerpt from the episode:

Mervé Emre: As I was preparing for this conversation, there was some sort of glitch on the New Yorker website. When I typed in Doreen St. Felix to look at her reviews and essays, the system pulled up every article ever written in the magazine’s history. This seemed appropriate because Doreen is the most prolific critic I know, with wide-ranging interests and surprising topics. Here are some of the artists I discovered through his work:

There is the violinist from the Sudan Archives who, Doreen writes, “does not sit still when she plays. She uses video game-inspired choreography, twirling her bow as if it were a sword or a snake, as if she were a charmer or a warrior. Lately, she has equipped herself with a studded quiver, drawing her bow like an archer.

There’s cult astronomer Susan Miller, who gives readings perched atop a trunk that is, I quote again, “space blue on the outside, with a circular opening that reveals the interior where hanging the orbs representing Saturn and Pluto.”

There’s photographer Alicia Rodriguez Alvisa, whose dubbed images of women Doreen compares to taking a selfie: “I think about how I sometimes turn my phone on myself and then am confronted with dozens of copies antagonists of me who coagulate into an image that has nothing to do with the photo. idea of ​​what I want to look like.

Doreen writes about everything: public art and the history of Confederate monuments, the Republican primary debates, Kesha’s new album, anti-black police violence, photographs of Clifford Prince King, Jerry Springer, Alex Trebek and much more sure, television. If you watched it, Doreen talked about it in her beautifully muscular style, with her keen political sense and wicked sense of humor. His television column from 2020 to 2022 will be considered one of the founding archives of television criticism. I think of her as our John Berger, a Shepherd of the movie age.

For a full transcript and details of the article Doreen responded to, visit the New York Review of Books.

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Doreen St-Félix was an editor at The New Yorker since 2017. Previously, she was culture editor at MTV News. His writings appeared in Times Magazine, new York, Vogue, The fader, and Fork. St. Félix was named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” media list in 2016. In 2017, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and in 2019, she won in the same category.

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Criticism and its audiences
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