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 Award - winning
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 essays - book reviews, public lectures,
columns that he wrote for the liberal arts journal Salmagundi -
that have appeared elsewhere over the past two decades.
Interestingly, the hodgepodge format doesn't 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 widely - from Mallarme to Mailer, from W.S. Merwin to Leopold
Senghor - Shattuck'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. (Kirkus Reviews)
With incisive analysis, he elucidates the nature of intellectual
craftsmanship, defends art's undeniable moral component, and, faced
with an academic world shattered by theory, laments how
extra-literary politics have grown increasingly dominant, now
attempting to eliminate the very category of literature. Whether
commenting on Foucault, Pulp Fiction, Georgia O'Keeffe, V.S.
Naipaul, or the survival of a core tradition in the humanities,
Shattuck presents a stirring synthesis of the principles and values
by which we can live together as a nation finally at peace with its
diversity. A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and a TLS
Notable Book of 1999.
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