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The divided, inquisitive soul of A.O. Scott. Or: What are critics good for?

A.O. Scott laughs when he remembers the question: "Who made you the high priest of all that is wonderful and horrible?" His friend and New York Times colleague, the late David Carr, wanted to know what gives a critic the right to be a critic. It's a question good critics ask themselves on a regular basis: Why do I do what I do? Why might what I think matter? What is criticism good for, anyway?

Scott, one of two chief film critics at the Times, thinks about such matters so much he devoted a book to them. He'll discuss that book, Better Living Through Criticism (Penguin, $26), Monday night at Highland Park Methodist Church. Admission is free. But you'll want to pack a thinking cap.

Better Living has its share of epigrammatic wit, starting with introductory quotes from Oscar Wilde and Susan Sontag and progressing to Scott's own gems: "It's the job of art to free our minds, and the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom." But anyone seeking a compendium of pat answers and explanations will be disappointed.

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Scott approaches his task like a self-deprecating philosopher. He's more likely to answer his questions with further questions than offer a brisk summary of the critic's role.

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"That's just temperamentally how I think: questions generate more questions," Scott says by phone. "But it's also my model of how criticism works, that it's never finished. There's always more to be said. There's always another point of view to be considered. Criticism is very dialectical. You come upon a position, or state an idea, and you immediately see its opposite."

So it makes sense that the liveliest sections of Better Living Through Criticism are intervals of dialogue between Scott and...Scott. Scott the skeptic, who can be seen as a member of his non-critic readership, asks Scott the critic, in a variety of ways, to justify his existence. Scott the critic thrusts and parries, prompting Scott the skeptic to employ a different rhetorical tact. And so it goes.

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At a recent book event in San Francisco, the cultural critic Greil Marcus described these sections as Scott arguing with his guilty conscience. Scott says they're " two characters, one skeptical and literal minded, the other very poetic, and idealistic, and provocative." I think of them as The Divided Soul of A.O. Scott.

As Scott points out, critics, like all journalists, love to ask questions. We're curious creatures: Why did that work? Why didn't that? Why is this making me cry? (Scott has seen Creed three times and hasn't left with a dry eye yet). So it's only natural that we turn our interrogative impulses upon ourselves. For all our inquisitiveness, critics can also be rather solipsistic.

Better Living Through Criticism can be read as a playful but rigorous defense of the intellectual process and the curious-minded, the act of asking "How?" and "Why?" You know, those questions we start posing in our earliest years.

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"Anti-intellectualism is virtually our civic religion," Scott writes in the first of those dialogues, echoing the title of Richard Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning 1963 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. The antidote is the embrace of ideas and openness to paradox. In this sense criticism is less about final judgment than the routes that guide us there.

But this leads us to another critical paradox. The critic must, above all, experience what he or she is critiquing. I like to think of Wordsworth's famous description of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility" (or, if you hated it, emotion recollected in hostility). How, then, to feel that emotion in the midst of intellectualizing your experience? How do you get from the head to the heart?

"It's very important to open yourself up to the experience, clear your mind of its prejudices and expectations, and not to start thinking immediately about the review you're going to write," Scott says. "It's almost like a meditation practice, to just wipe the slate clean and make yourself available to the experience, because for me the experience is the key, the place where any criticism starts."

A.O. Scott discusses his book Better Living Through Criticism 7 p.m. Monday at Highland Park Methodist Church, 3300 Mockingbird Lane, Dallas. Admission is free. For more information visit hpumc.org.