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| The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals
ISBN: 9780231539890
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Columbia University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Philosophy Modern -- 20th century; Intellectual life -- 20th century; Literature Modern -- Themes motives;
The 12 literary essays collected in this volume are bottomless wells of provocation and insight. In each, Boyers (founding editor of the journal Salmagundi) scrutinizes a thematically broad topic from a variety of angles and approaches. He begins "Authority" from a sociopolitical perspective before segueing into an appreciation of Susan Sontag's confident authority as a cultural critic. In "Fidelity," he explores the topic in contexts ranging from marriage to the student-teacher relationship. Several essays on widely divergent ideas resonate harmoniously with one another, notably "Reading from the Life," in which Boyers discusses several celebrated authors who embraced opposing values in their life and art, and "Saving Beauty," about his ambivalence toward a friend who's a charming, attractive serial philanderer. Boyers skillfully grounds philosophically heady topics in understandable everyday realities, as in "The Sublime," which at one point he senses as the "outsize sentiment" he feels for "things Italian," despite his frustration with the country's inefficient bureaucracy. He is also adept at encapsulating an idea in a well-turned phrase, as in his observation that "we admire beauty, in works of art especially, because they embody a successful mastery of everything that says no or impossible to every effort at an ideal, unimpeachable sufficiency." Readers who crave rich food for thought will find much to savor in this volume. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Robert Boyers is professor of English at Skidmore College and founder and editor of the quarterly Salmagundi . He is also director of The New York State Summer Writers Institute. His many books include The Dictator's Dictation: The Politics of Novels and Novelists and a volume of short stories entitled Excitable Women, Damaged Men . His essays have appeared in Harper's , the New Republic , the Nation , Granta , the Yale Review , and many other magazines. |
