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."synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
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
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