Authors: Jacques Barzun, Michael Murray
ISBN-13: 9780060935429, ISBN-10: 0060935421
Format: Paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Date Published: July 2003
Edition: Reprint
Born in France in 1907, Jacques Barzun came to the United States in 1920. After graduating from Columbia College, he joined the faculty of the university, becoming Seth Low Professor of History and, for a decade, Dean of Faculties and Provost. The author of some thirty books, including the New York Times bestseller From Dawn to Decadence, he received the Gold Medal for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he was twice president. He lives in San Antonio, Texas.
Throughout his distinguished career, Jacques Barzunhas been known as an essayist who combines a depth of knowledge and a rare facility with words. Now, collected for the first time in one volume are 80 of his most accomplished essays. The list of subjects covered has an amazing range: history, philosophy, literature, education, musicand more. Here is Barzun's classic examination of baseball in American life, Lincoln as a literary genius, and the pleasures of reading crime fiction.
Among the many diverse figures whom Barzun re-examines, leading to fresh portraits, include: Shaw, Berlioz, Swift, both Henry and WilliamJames, Dorothy Sayers, Chapman, Agate, and Diderot. Barzun draws the reader into his enthusiasms with an infectious style and keen insights. A Jacques Barzun Reader is a feast for any reader.
H Beginning with Barzun's fearless argument for the centrality of race in Western consciousness in his 1937 essay "Race: Fact or Fiction?," and concluding with several selections from 2000's epic bestseller, From Dawn to Decadence, this is a staggering tribute to eber-critic Barzun's legendary intelligence and cantankerousness. Literature is a prime topic: his essays on Swift, Diderot and Shaw brilliantly revitalize well-worn subjects, while "How the Romantics Invented Shakespeare" intriguingly probes the historiography of the Bard's ever-changing reputation. Barzun's own occupation is another dominant concern; Barzun asks, is criticism art or craft?, coming down, conclusively, on the side of craft. Other topics include opera, politics, baseball and Paris in the 1830s. What truly impresses here is Barzun's breadth of knowledge in an age of academic specialization, he is a rare, confident master-of-all-trades. Barzun is also unafraid of being silly, as in a brief aside on the "puncreas," a gland that, when inflamed, causes people to "puncreate" uncontrollably. Of course, readers may not agree with all Barzun's conclusions: he can be exasperatingly arbitrary (detective novels are great but spy novels are not); he can also seem foggily behind the times (as with his fierce defense of "man" as a gender-neutral term). But, taken as a whole, these more than six dozen essays constitute one of the great critical collections of recent times and amply showcase one of the outstanding scholarly intellects of the last century. (Jan.) Forecast: From Dawn to Decadence may have created a new audience for Barzun, though this, a collection of previously published material, will probably get less media attention. Still, this should be a steady, long-term seller. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Introduction | ||
I | On a Pragmatic View of Life | |
Toward a Fateful Serenity | 3 | |
II | On the Two Ways of Knowing: History and Science | |
The Search for Truths | 15 | |
History as Counter-Method and Anti-Abstraction | 19 | |
The Imagination of the Real | 26 | |
Cultural History: A Synthesis | 27 | |
Alfred North Whitehead | 34 | |
William James: The Mind as Artist | 35 | |
Thomas Beddoes, M.D. | 39 | |
Science and Scientism | 49 | |
Myths for Materialists | 69 | |
III | On What Critics Argue About | |
Criticism: An Art or a Craft? | 79 | |
The Scholar-Critic | 87 | |
James Agate and His Nine Egos | 92 | |
The Grand Pretense | 103 | |
On Sentimentality | 107 | |
Samuel Butler | 108 | |
On Romanticism | 114 | |
Dorothy Sayers | 116 | |
John Jay Chapman | 120 | |
Remembering Lionel Trilling | 129 | |
IV | On Language and Style | |
Rhetoric - What It Is; Why Needed | 149 | |
The Retort Circumstantial | 156 | |
The Necessity of a Common Tongue | 160 | |
The Word "Man" | 168 | |
On Biography | 172 | |
Venus at Large: Sexuality and the Limits of Literature | 175 | |
Onoma-Onomato-Onomatwaddle | 186 | |
V | On Some Classic | |
Swift, or Man's Capacity for Reason | 193 | |
Why Diderot? | 203 | |
William Hazlitt | 213 | |
How the Romantics Invented Shakespeare | 216 | |
Bernard Shaw | 231 | |
Goethe's Faust | 235 | |
When the Orient Was New: Byron, Kinglake, and Flaubert | 250 | |
The Permanence of Oscar Wilde | 272 | |
Bagehot as Historian | 284 | |
Lincoln the Literary Artist | 293 | |
The Reign of William and Henry | 304 | |
VI | On Music and Design | |
Why Opera? | 323 | |
Is Music Unspeakable? | 324 | |
Music for Europe: A Travers Chants | 337 | |
To Praise Varese | 354 | |
Delacroix | 358 | |
Visual Evidence of a New Age | 362 | |
Museum Piece 1967 | 366 | |
Why Art Must Be Challenged | 374 | |
VII | On Teaching and Learning | |
The Art of Making Teachers | 387 | |
Where the Educational Nonsense Comes From | 391 | |
Occupational Disease: Verbal Inflation | 392 | |
The Centrality of Reading | 396 | |
The Tyranny of Testing | 401 | |
History for Beginners | 404 | |
Of What Use the Classics Today? | 412 | |
The University's Primary Task | 423 | |
The Scholar Is an Institution | 424 | |
Exeunt the Humanities | 426 | |
VIII | On America Past and Present | |
On Baseball | 437 | |
Race: Fact or Fiction? | 443 | |
Thoreau the Thorough Impressionist | 447 | |
The Railroad | 465 | |
The Great Switch | 470 | |
Is Democratic Theory for Export? | 473 | |
Administering and the Law | 488 | |
The Three Enemies of Intellect | 492 | |
An American Commencement | 509 | |
IX | On France and the French | |
Paris in 1830 | 519 | |
Food for the NRF | 539 | |
French and Its Vagaries | 545 | |
Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas | 553 | |
X | On Crime, True and Make-Believe | |
The Aesthetics of the Criminous | 563 | |
Rex Stout | 564 | |
A Catalogue of Crime | 567 | |
Why Read Crime Fiction? | 571 | |
The Place and Point of "True Crime" | 578 | |
Meditations on the Literature of Spying | 581 | |
XI | A Miscellany | |
Definitions | 591 | |
Jottings | 593 | |
Clerihews | 595 | |
Ars Poetica | 597 | |
Bibliography | 599 | |
Index of Names | 605 |