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It’s unlikely that Mitt Romney saw the film “The Graduate” when it appeared in 1967. He was a 20-year-old Mormon missionary in France at the time, isolated from the cultural influences that shaped most Americans of the baby-boom generation, and his taste in movies ran to more wholesome fare like “The Sound of Music.”
Nietzsche reminds us that philosophers have always taken great pains to hide themselves, whether behind the mask of Socrates or the mask of the categorical imperative. It is as if they believe anonymity will help them persuade readers that the systems they create are disinterested, objective, and universally valid—a collection of necessary truths. But this didn’t fool Nietzsche. “Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been,” he writes in Beyond Good and Evil. “Namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”
How to portray the state referred to as mental illness? Who tells the story and with what language? Narratives tend to be categorical and unspecific. Dr. Jung famously told his patient James Joyce that the difference between him and his daughter Lucia—a dancer who was permanently institutionalized in her late twenties because of a “deteriorating mental state,” later diagnosed as schizophrenia—was one of control. “You are like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling the other diving,” Jung claimed. But what does that mean? Who was Lucia; what was her story?
French novelist and
In 1832, Charles Knowlton, a doctor in Ashfield, Massachusetts, published a short book with a long title: Fruits of Philosophy: The Private Companion of Young Married People, by a Physician. Knowlton, who was thirty-one, was a “freethinker” and, by the standards of the Berkshires, an unusually adventurous soul. While attending the New Hampshire Medical Institute (now Dartmouth Medical School), he was too poor to pay for a dissecting class and so had liberated a corpse from a cemetery.
The life of Claude Lanzmann, Claude Lanzmann declares at the beginning of his memoir, has been ‘a rich, multifaceted and unique story’. Self-flattery is characteristically Lanzmannian, but its truth in this case can hardly be denied. He has lived on a grand scale. A teenage fighter in the Resistance, he became Sartre’s protégé in the early 1950s as an editor at Les Temps modernes. He also became – with Sartre’s blessing – Beauvoir’s lover, ‘the only man with whom Simone de Beauvoir lived a quasi-marital existence’. He marched with the left against the wars in Algeria and Vietnam; moonlighted
The Recognitions, William Gaddis’s first novel, spent the two decades after its 1955 publication as an often out-of-print cult novel, read and discussed by a cadre of devotees who, as William Gass writes in his introduction to the 1993 Penguin Classics edition, “would keep its existence known until such time as it could be accepted as a classic.” For Gaddis fanatics, this history has become a kind of fable: how the great author, driven underground by critical ignorance and the neglect of his publisher, worked various corporate jobs until, in 1975, he would return to lampoon Wall Street in his
Twitter's recent announcement that the social network will allow country-specific censorship aroused fury on and off the Internet. Under the new policy, Twitter will place a gray bar over tweets deemed inappropriate for popular consumption by local governmental authorities. Commentators, protesters, and “Tweetavists” expressed their outrage. Blackout protests were proposed in response, and activists warned of the potential of unreported massacres in Syria. Since then, however, the company has made clear that it will only censor tweets when it receives specific and valid requests to do so. But
If The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides, had been written by a woman yet still had the same title and wedding ring on its cover, would it have received a great deal of serious literary attention? Or would this novel (which I loved) have been relegated to “Women’s Fiction,” that close-quartered lower shelf where books emphasizing relationships and the interior lives of women are often relegated? Certainly The Marriage Plot, Eugenides’s first novel since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex, was poised to receive tremendous literary interest regardless of subject matter, but the presence of
Any student of silent cinema, critical theory, and the Frankfurt School, or film aesthetics and the avant-garde, will surely at one point or another have come into contact with the work of Miriam Hansen. Her groundbreaking study Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991) inspired a generation of film scholars to place greater emphasis on the ways in which film audiences constitute an alternative public sphere. Likewise, her trenchant essays published over the last few decades in New German Critique, on whose editorial board she served, Critical Inquiry, October, and elsewhere
There are two man-made objects visible from space. One is the Great Wall of China. The other is a newer addition: a massive garbage dump at Fresh Kills, New York, home to fifty years’ worth of New York City’s trash.
In the age of global warming, peak oil, devastating droughts, and dying species, it might seem a bit quaint to make the case, as Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Edward Humes does in Garbology, that the United States—the world’s largest generator of trash—will soon confront a new crisis of garbage.
But Humes’s argument isn’t a castigation of litterbugs. It’s a persuasive and
Author of The Soviet Novel, a classic analysis of socialist-realist fiction of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, and a professor of Slavic literature at Yale, Katerina Clark here reads the text of High Stalinism. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome—a series of linked essays following an adroitly plotted historical narrative—she recounts a scandalous episode in art history, while making a significant contribution to the understanding of 1930s European political culture and providing a lucid guide to the late-’30s period of mainly Soviet collective mania.
Clark ranges from literature to cinema to theater to
I know how to sharpen pencils. I shove them into the electric pencil sharpener suction-cupped onto a corner of my desk. It growls so satisfyingly and provides a kind of smoke break for a nonsmoker—a perfect bit of procrastination. Some days I am committed to sharpening every pencil I can find before starting work—even though I do most of my work with a fountain pen.
Anyway, this book has a great title. Surely, though, the name—to say nothing of the wider project of artisanal pencil sharpening—is some kind of a metaphor. Is this a self-help guide about learning to live life more simply or