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Overview
We disagree. From small questions of taste to large questions concerning the nature of existence, intellectual debate takes up much of our time. In this book the respected literary critic Arthur Krystal examines what most commentators ignore: the role of temperament and taste in the forming of aesthetic and ideological opinions. In provocative essays about reading and writing, about the relation between life and literature, about knowledge and certainty, about God and death, and about his own gradual disaffection with the literary scene, Krystal demonstrates that opposing points of view are based more on innate predilections than on disinterested thought or analysis. Not beholden to any fashionable theory or political agenda, Krystal interrogates the usual suspects in the cultural wars from an independent, though not impartial, vantage point. Clearly personal and unabashedly belletrist, his essays ask important questions. What makes culture one thing and not another? What inspires aesthetic values? What drives us to make comparisons? And how does a bias for one kind of evidence as opposed to another contribute to the form and content of intellectual argument?Editorials
Library Journal
Essayist, reviewer, and editor Krystal (A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling) pulls no punches in dispatching academic critics who view works of literature primarily as "semiotic tracts that reflect all sorts of nasty, royalist, elitist, patriarchal, sexist, and imperialist sympathies." He sees the activities of writing and reading as deeply connected to basic human questions of life, death, religion, value, and taste. In graceful, conversational prose, he both argues and demonstrates his points, easily combining his knowledge of history and philosophy with the personal to give readers a view of an engaged mind. The essays collected here have previously appeared in American Scholar, the New York Times Book Review, and Harper's. The most famous of them, "Closing the Books: A Once-Devoted Reader Arrives at the End of the Story," attempts to come to terms with his own loss of interest in reading. Is it his age, he wonders, or the age? Recommended for academic libraries.-Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.Book Details
Published
October 1, 2002
Publisher
New Haven : Yale University Press, c2002.
Pages
208
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780300092165