Cringe criticism

The Cornell University Department of Music will host a colloquium on April 28 called “Cringe Criticism: On Embarrassment and Tori Amos.” Some Tori Amos fans were under the impression this colloquium was going to make fun of them. However, the initiator, Nick Salvato, shed some light on the subject:

I’ve heard that there has been some suspicion about — and hostility toward — the very notion of this talk (based solely on its title) in the Tori Amos “webiverse” — and I want to assure you (and, perhaps by way of you, others) that the talk is in no way intended as a disparagement of Amos’s music or of her fans (among whose number I count myself). Rather, the talk will be an exploration of the complex and understudied feeling of embarrassment; of what Amos’s music may teach us about that feeling; and of what distinguishes “critical embarrassment” (the version of the feeling experienced, on public occasions, by public intellectuals, academics, professors, and others of their stripes) from the run-of-the-mill or “garden variety” embarrassment that we all feel in everyday situations. In the end, the talk will be much more about embarrassment and the work of criticism than it is about Amos’s music.

And there you have it.