The Role of the Critic

Elizabeth Hardwick has been an interesting kind of connective force for me. She's also managed to connect me, I think, to other people who also want to think about criticism and how it should be practiced. Sontag, I think I came to the same way that Toby did. But my identification was a little bit more situational because she spent a year at Oxford and wrote about how depressing it was to be surrounded by all these male virgins. And I thought, well, course, sorry.