Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education and the Arts - Hardcover

Shattuck, Roger

3.62

34 ratings by Goodreads

9780393048070: Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education and the Arts

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393048071 ISBN 13: 9780393048070

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999

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An urgent cry for meaning in a world where theory has often usurped substance, Candor and Perversion illuminates the world of twentieth-century literature.

In this volume, eminent National Book Award-winning critic Roger Shattuck takes up the cudgel to affirm literature as a central field of study and personal reward. With incisive analysis, he explores the nature of intellectual craftsmanship in a society rampant with anti-intellectualism and pretension. Shattuck argues that American literary studies have embarked on a wayward course in recent decades. He shows how politics and theory have grown increasingly dominant and now threaten to eliminate the very category of literature. Looking to the past for guidance, Shattuck offers a powerful vision of a common literary and philosophical heritage. Whether commenting on Flaubert, Georgia O'Keeffe, V. S. Naipaul, the movies, or education, Shattuck explores the principles and values by which we can live together as one country and one culture at peace with our diversity. Roger Shattuck has served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, taught for many years at Boston University, and now resides in Vermont. He is the author of The Banquet Years, Marcel Proust (National Book Award, 1974), The Innocent Eye, and, most recently, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography.

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Review:

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

About the Author:

Roger Shattuck, author of Forbidden Knowledge and Proust's Way, has won the National Book Award. He lives in Vermont.

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