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I'm Amanda Knox, and you're listening to Hard Knocks.

I'm Amanda Knox, and you're listening to Hard Knocks.

Welcome to another episode of Old School.

Today we go back to my conversation with Claire Deuterer, a critic and memoirist who wrote a book called Monsters, a fans Dilemma. It's all about what do you do with the fact that there is great art that is made by terrible people. Her personal crisis of being a huge fan of like certain films by certain filmmakers who may or may not have sexually abused young children.

She traces this question from mid-century new criticism to today and when biography is totally inescapable. And I think that that's going to be a really interesting conversation because

I bring a really unusual twist.

I'm someone who has had my own biography weaponized against me, but in a completely twisted way.

So this episode is really interesting because it's trying, it's like trying to figure out, do you and can you separate art from the artist? And is that

even a category error to begin with? Can you still enjoy thriller after learning what Michael Jackson

did? Or does knowing that Picasso was a misogynist asshole ruin your ability to appreciate

Gwenrica? The question of if we can separate the art from the

artist, and whether we should, even if we can, has a long history. In the 1940s, a school of

literary criticism arose called new criticism that asserted that the work must stand alone,

that considerations of biography should play no

role in how we interpret or react to art.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges lampooned and dissected this idea in his short

story Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote, in which a 19th century Frenchman manages to

write the exact text of Don Quixote,

originally authored in 17th century Spanish by Miguel Cervantes.

Menard does not copy Cervantes' text, but arrives at the same sequence of words independently.

...