Context for critique

I've been taking in the work of a film critic known as Moviebob a lot lately. Bernie introduced me to him a few years ago, when he did a movie review show and a pop culture analysis show on the Escapist. He's since left that website and is doing his own thing, and in recent times I've made a point of following his work. He is an intelligent, observant commentator with a broad, well-rounded perspective, and is a superstar of on-screen literary analysis. Even when I don't agree with him-- estimated at around %20-%30 of the time, and not for anything particular about his critical perspective --I almost always respect the place he's coming from. As I'm teaching my own class based around literary analysis right now, I've actually used him as one of my models for how I approach interpretation of text.

One of the concepts Moviebob really made me aware of as a critic is the influence of outer context on what makes it into a written work. He's really brilliant at examining the culture and circumstances in which a work is created and received, and how that affects both what gets into it and how people respond to it. He uses it to particularly good effect in Really That Good, a series about why certain movies have withstood the test of time past their intial burst of popularity. That's particularly relevant for me in my teaching capacity, as I've couched my class partly in terms of of how, when a protagonist of a piece is culturally embraced, what about that culture made that protagonist appeal to it.

Now that I think of it, the usefulness of understanding a work's context is part of the reason I keep this blog. I've always cherished this fantasy that if my work every becomes truly important in the literary world, people will turn to my personal writings to gain greater understanding when they analyze it. This blog makes record of my context. Even before I knew how important that was consciously, I found myself documenting it for the possibility of supplying that information about my work.