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Shattuck, Roger Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education and the Arts
W W Norton & Co Ltd 2000 0393048071 / 9780393048070 Hardcover New Hardcover
New. Rubbing and bumping to publisher's quarter-bound boards in like dust jacket. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.In Candor and Perversion Roger Shattuck carries on two conversations. The more strident of the two, deceptively titled "Intellectual Craftsmanship," takes up the first section of this collection of essays and reviews. Here Shattuck engages in verbal fisticuffs with those who would mire the study of literature in the byzantine politics of identity and the arcane language of theory. Insisting that he's not a conservative, he instead gives himself the coy title of "conservationist." "Some of us," he writes, "have come to believe that it is possible, even necessary, to be liberal in political matters and conservationist in cultural matters." Shattuck lays bare the perceived dangers besetting the traditional literary scholar, and insists on the primacy of canonical texts in our universities: "In order to have a common frame of reference within which to reason together, I would argue that there are books everyone should read." Lest anyone think him extreme, he follows up quickly: "And we should never stop discussing which ones those are."... Ironically, Shattuck does more to support his position in the second half of his book, which is devoted to the practice of criticism. In two dozen book reviews and essays he engages in a passionate, learned, and imaginative conversation with the greats of Western civilization. This is a scholarship of compulsion: Shattuck returns again and again to key touchstones, such as Virginia Woolf's statement that "on or about December 1910 human character changed." His enthusiasms spawn new forms of criticism, such as his delightful fairy tale "The Story of Hans/Jean/Kaspar Arp," which tells of a child "born in Strasbourg with bright eyes, nice big ears, and a wonderful egg-shaped head. All his life, he liked egg-shaped things--clouds, pebbles, jars, fruits." Shattuck here is so worked up over Arp's art that he struggles to find a new critical shape to contain his joyful interest. Such lively writing does more to make his case for studying the so-called dead white males than all his polemics. --Claire Dederer ... Written over the past 15 years, this gathering of retired Boston University professor Shattuck's essays and reviews begins with a vociferous section on the education wars, leveling shots at cultural relativism and the politicization of education. In 1994, at the founding session of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, of which Shattuck was later president, the author read "Nineteen Theses on Literature," which distilled his beliefs in a traditional academic approach based on a faith in authors and their works. The theses are reproduced here, along with critiques of other books on education, as well as musings on reading, teaching, language and thought. Shattuck's tone is sometimes polemical, but the essays that follow are his own best defense. In pieces on Manet, impressionism, futurism, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp ("the court jester of modernism"), he demonstrates the keen insight and fluid prose produced by a deep and broad education, strongly focused (on early 20th-century French culture) and sophisticated, yet open to unexpected correspondences and plainspoken analysis. His affinity for figures like Mallarm?, who was both a dutiful citizen and a revolutionary poet, is a reminder that, despite some conservative views on education, Shattuck has always been a champion of the new and experimental in art. From The Banquet Years (1955) to the NBA-winning Marcel Proust (1974) to Forbidden Knowledge (1996), he has blazed his own intellectual trail, and readers will welcome this latest foray into the groves of art and academe. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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3.47 GBP
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