Examples of Cultural Critics
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment
- The work is a history of the modern penal system. Foucault analyzes punishment in its social context, and examines how changing power relations affected punishment.
- Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968
- The collection includes four different episodes about the following: the worldwide student radicalism in the late twentieth-century, the anti-Communist trend, and American and French thinkers of self-criticism.
- Wendy Kaminer, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional
- The work is a condemnation of the self-help movement. There are social implications that claims that the movement causes passivity, social isolation, and nondemocratic ideas.
- John McGowan, Democracy's Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics
- The work considers how intellectuals attempt to pursue socio-political goals in the early twenty-first century.
- Katha Pollitt, Reasonable Creatures
- The collection of essays includes many topics that involve women. It also reflects on social attitudes about rape, gender roles, surrogate mothering, reproductive rights and prejudice against older and unmarried women.
- Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections
- The collection of essays reveals the mind of a social critic who readily denounces contemporary culture to show tendencies relating to education, habits, and obsessions.
- George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle
- The work is a reflection on the deterioration of Western culture.
- Vassily Aksyonov, In Search of Melancholy Baby
- Aksenov's auto-biographical novel provides insight about personal relationship with America from the point of view of an exiled emigre.
- Sebastian de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere
- The work chronicles the history of censorship in a nation that supposedly guarantees freedom of speech.
- Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil
- The work of intellectual history argues that Americans, who once understood their history as a struggle against the devil, have become increasingly oblivious to the truth about evil.