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Roger Shattuck Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education and the Arts
London, United Kingdom W. W. Norton & Company 2000 0393048071 / 9780393048070 Trade Paperback Very Good Very Good
0393048071 This book contains many essays on literature, education, and the arts. It is written based on Shattuck"s seminal "Nineteen Theses" and form the philosophical basis of this volume. A few of these theses are: Across millions of years we have evolved a fairly stable human nature, which contains an elusive element of freedom; Literature ranges from simple songs and saying to elaborate and extended tales of human deeds; Works that have survived for centuries cannot be dismissed out of hand; Nothing will survive unless it has been uttered; We teach what we hope to learn; In a free society, the primary role of education is the transmission of a heritage, not its primary subversion; There is no literary "canon." Tastes and curricula keep changing. It is our love of literature that remains constant. From these, three major sections unfold: Intellectual Craftsmanship, A Critic"s Job of Work, and America, Africa, and Elsewhere, in which several essays address individual personalities, including O"Keefe and Stieglitz, Man Ray, Leopold Senghor, Octavio Paz, Arthur Miller, and others. 415 pages including credits, source of illustrations, and an index. Editorial Reviews Amazon.com 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 From Publishers Weekly 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. From Library Journal An award-winning American critic and Proust scholar, Shattuck enjoys a wide readership, and a new book by him is always something of a literary event. In this authoritative collection of critical essays and occasional pieces, Shattuck shows the breadth of his interest in modern Western culture. He considers subjects as diverse as the writings of Michel Foucault, the "Beulah Quintet" novels of Mary Lee Settle, the accomplishments of Sarah Bernhardt, and the collaborative efforts of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Much of the book is devoted to the intellectual life of 19th- and 20th-century France, with Shattuck focusing on impressionism, symbolism, surrealism, and other avant-garde movements in art and literature. He also includes several insightful essays on the current state of higher education. For academic and larger public libraries, especially where there is an interest in French arts and letters.AEllen Sullivan, Ferguson Lib., Stamford, CT Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. The New York Times Book Review, Roger Kimball ...he is an expert at intellectual and moral triage, sorting patiently through the tangle of mixed motives that make for art, admiring the candor, admonishing the perversion. The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Nadine Gordimer Roger Shattuck is again the polymath who leaves you roused to think about those things you don't want to think about. And, with gratitude, need to. From Booklist "Like our terrestrial environment, our literary, intellectual, and moral environment needs to be wisely cultivated and protected." So reads the ninth of Shattuck's "Nineteen Theses on Literature," a set of propositions that have grown out of this distinguished critic's commitment to teaching and to living the intellectual life with energy and purpose. A masterful prose stylist who is as comfortable dissecting Pulp Fiction as he is unveiling the true nature of Foucault's writings, the work of Man Ray and Proust, and the creative dynamic between Stieglitz and O'Keeffe, Shattuck deplores the lowering of academic standards in schools and colleges and offers an exhilarating perspective on what a liberal education should provide. He argues that we must maintain a "steady center" from which humanistic traditions can be taught and urges the academy to drop fashionable politics and theory and go straight to the source by focusing on such enlightening books as Helen Keller's The Story of My Life. Shattuck's candor is galvanizing, his knowledge impressive, and his illumination of our habitual perversion of the truth a tonic. Donna Seaman From Kirkus Reviews Diverse essays on literature and the arts from an eminent critic who writes for the educated public rather than the academic specialist. Shattuck, professor emeritus of literature at Boston Univ., is probably best-known for his National Book Awardwinning biography of Marcel Proust and his various books on French modernism, but his interests have always been wide-ranging. The most recent of his 12 books (Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, 1996) explored its title theme from earliest myth to the contemporary critical preoccupation with transgression. The new book picks up 39 essaysbook reviews, public lectures, columns that he wrote for the liberal arts journal Salmagundithat have appeared elsewhere over the past two decades. Interestingly, the hodgepodge format doesnt vitiate the pleasure and insight that his book offers. In a way, it increases that pleasure, because it encourages browsing and dipping. Shattuck's prose is urbane but never pretentious, ``in the wake of the great literary journalists'' he admires: Hazlitt, Baudelaire, and Edmund Wilson. Shattuck is a resolutely public critic, and early essays in the collection polemicize against the obscurantism and what he sees also as the moral corruption of contemporary academic criticism. Michel Foucault and his followers, in particular, come in for a sound drubbing. But the book's greater part is taken up with book reviews, a genre that Shattuck masters with great flair. Reviews are the chief venue for literary journalism in our era, and Shattuck makes the most of it. Even though the books under review vary widelyfrom Mallarm to Mailer, from W.S. Merwin to Leopold SenghorShattuck's own vision emerges clearly. Throughout he emphasizes the moral dimension of criticism, the link between art and lived human experience, and the ethical imperative of what he calls ``intellectual craftsmanship.'' Even if his polemics are a bit one-sided and sanctimonious, the overall effect of his writing about art and literature is engaging. -- Copyright ?©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Nadine Gordimer, Los Angeles Times Book Review Shattuck leaves you roused to think about those things you don't want to think about. And, with gratitude, need to. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. Roger Kimball, The New York Times Book Review Shattuck is an expert at sorting through the mixed motives that make for art. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. Harold Bloom Shattuck is both an exemplary reader and a disturbing moralist, in my judgment surpassing Camus. Book Description 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. About the Author Roger Shattuck taught for many years at Boston University and now resides in Vermont. He won the National Book Award in 1974 for Marcel Proust. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. Condition: Clean and unmarked. Some cover curl and a bent page or two.
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