Jewish Writing and the Deep Places of the Imagination »

Mark Krupnick (1939-2003) was professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, editor of Displacement: Derrida and After, and author of Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism and more than two hundred essays and reviews.

    When he learned he had ALS and roughly two years to live, literary critic Mark Krupnick returned to the writers who had been his lifelong conversation partners and asked with renewed intensity: how do you live as a Jew, when, mostly, you live in your head? The evocative and sinuous essays collected here are the products of this inquiry. In his search for durable principles, Krupnick follows Lionel Trilling, Cynthia Ozick, Geoffrey Hartman, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and others into the elemental matters of life and death, sex and gender, power and vulnerability.

    The editors—Krupnick’s wife, Jean K. Carney, and literary critic Mark Shechner—have also included earlier essays and introductions that link Krupnick’s work with the “deep places” of his own imagination.

	Foreword
	"A shit-filled life" : Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater	15
	"We are here to be humiliated" : Philip Roth's recent fiction	40
	Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth, and Holocaust testimonies Cynthia Ozick : embarrassments	72
	Lionel Trilling and the deep places of the imagination	99
	The Trillings : a marriage of true minds?	125
	Lionel Trilling and the politics of style	138
	Philip Rahv : "he never learned to swim"	157
	Alfred Kazin and Irvain Howe	178
	The two worlds of cultural criticism	192
	Edmund Wilson and gentile philo-semitism	209
	Listmania in Humboldt's gift	225
	Assimilation in recent Jewish American autobiographies	233
	Revisiting Morrie : were his last words too good to be true?	255
	The art of the obituary	261
	Why are English departments still fighting the culture wars?	271
	Upon retirement	276
	Afterword	287
	Biographical summary	337