Bad Behavior

Bad Behavior is concerned with the reasons so many readers and critics of Johnson have been led to regularly subsume into the monumental precedent of Johnson the sage, the material conditions of modern authority expressed by self-reflections of Johnson the hack.

Dr. Wechselblatt argues that Johnson's double self-construction as at once high-cultural sage and popular hack dramatizes tensions between learned and commercial cultures in the emerging public sphere of contemporary civil society. As Johnson was acutely aware, the great paradox of cultural criticism is that it depends for its authority on the very culture it criticizes.

For this reason, it is particularly useful to read Johnson through his critics - to re-configure, from the directions criticism has taken, criticism's own conditions of possibility. Bad Behavior investigates the critical reduction of Johnson's discourse to its maxims, and the relation of this critical practice to the peculiarly modern identification felt by fans toward celebrities.