false 15965 0 0 762787 0394704150 9780394704159 22 <![CDATA[The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178137911m/762787.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/762787.The_Banquet_Years_The_Origins_of_the_Avant_Garde_in_France_1885_to_World_War_I 4.29 114 15965 3.99 397 65 88506 0156005514 9780156005517 12 <![CDATA[Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171135111m/88506.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88506.Forbidden_Knowledge_From_Prometheus_to_Pornography 3.56 80 Forbidden Knowledge is a study of the ethics of literary and scientific inquiry. Shattuck first approaches his subject indirectly, conducting an engaging tour of Western literature: Adam and Eve, Prometheus, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He then uses these tales to address the moral questions raised by mankind's tendency to search for dangerous knowledge. He contrasts J. Robert Oppenheimer's acceptance of guilt for the atomic bombings with Edward Teller's dismissal of the same. In his own field of literary criticism he argues against the neutral analysis of immoral works as "pure literature," illustrating his point with a critique of the Marquis de Sade. Forbidden Knowledge is a stimulating and forceful intellectual argument against moral relativism, as well as a practical approach to difficult ethical problems, from genetic engineering to pornography.]]> 15965 3.99 397 65 28388 0393321800 9780393321807 4 <![CDATA[Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167946474m/28388.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28388.Proust_s_Way_A_Field_Guide_to_In_Search_of_Lost_Time 3.70 30 In Search of Lost Time, Roger Shattuck is a godsend. Winner of the National Book Award for Marcel Proust, a sweeping examination of Proust's life and works, Shattuck now offers a useful and eminently readable guidebook to Proust's epic masterpiece, and a contemplation of memory and consciousness throughout great literature. Here, Shattuck laments Proust's defenselessness against zealous editors, praises some translations, and presents Proust as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched only by his irrepressible comic sense. Proust's Way, the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship, will serve as the next generation's guide to one of the world's finest writers of fiction.]]> 15965 3.99 397 65 88543 1568360487 9781568360485 3 <![CDATA[The Forbidden Experiment]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171135218m/88543.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88543.The_Forbidden_Experiment 3.60 15 The next day, the gendarmes took the boy to a hospice in a nearby town. From there, writes the historian and literary scholar Roger Shattuck, his path took this "prisoner without a crime," now called Victor, into the studies and laboratories of revolutionary France, where the boy presented a rare homegrown instance of Rousseau's "noble savage" to the civilized world. Much scholarly and scientific debate surrounded him. Finally, Victor, now famed as the "wild boy of Aveyron," came under the care of a sympathetic young doctor who concluded that Victor was in fact an abandoned deaf-mute, intelligent but forlorn, who had somehow been able to survive on his own. Dismissed in a contemporary encyclopedia as "half wild" and "incapable of learning to speak in spite of all efforts to teach him," Victor was eventually forgotten. "A state pension kept him alive, like an animal in a zoo," writes Shattuck, "and when he died no one noticed." Scientific debate about his condition was renewed from time to time, however, and the story of the wild boy was influential in the development of several theories of language learning and human evolution. Shattuck's slender narrative is a fine work of scholarly detection, yielding an instructive episode in the history of science. --Gregory McNamee

]]> 15965 3.99 397 65 101437 0393321118 9780393321111 1 <![CDATA[Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education, and the Arts]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171478668m/101437.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101437.Candor_and_Perversion_Literature_Education_and_the_Arts 4.40 5 Candor and Perversion Roger Shattuck carries on two conversations. The more strident of the two, deceptively titled "Intellectual Craftsmanship," takes up the first section of this collection of essays and reviews. Here Shattuck engages in verbal fisticuffs with those who would mire the study of literature in the byzantine politics of identity and the arcane language of theory. Insisting that he's not a conservative, he instead gives himself the coy title of "conservationist." "Some of us," he writes, "have come to believe that it is possible, even necessary, to be liberal in political matters and conservationist in cultural matters." Shattuck lays bare the perceived dangers besetting the traditional literary scholar, and insists on the primacy of canonical texts in our universities: "In order to have a common frame of reference within which to reason together, I would argue that there are books everyone should read." Lest anyone think him extreme, he follows up quickly: "And we should never stop discussing which ones those are."

Ironically, Shattuck does more to support his position in the second half of his book, which is devoted to the practice of criticism. In two dozen book reviews and essays he engages in a passionate, learned, and imaginative conversation with the greats of Western civilization. This is a scholarship of compulsion: Shattuck returns again and again to key touchstones, such as Virginia Woolf's statement that "on or about December 1910 human character changed." His enthusiasms spawn new forms of criticism, such as his delightful fairy tale "The Story of Hans/Jean/Kaspar Arp," which tells of a child "born in Strasbourg with bright eyes, nice big ears, and a wonderful egg-shaped head. All his life, he liked egg-shaped things--clouds, pebbles, jars, fruits." Shattuck here is so worked up over Arp's art that he struggles to find a new critical shape to contain his joyful interest. Such lively writing does more to make his case for studying the so-called dead white males than all his polemics. --Claire Dederer

]]> 15965 3.99 397 65 201473 0691013918 9780691013916 1 <![CDATA[Marcel Proust]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201473.Marcel_Proust 4.20 5 15965 3.99 397 65 864847 0691014035 9780691014036 1 <![CDATA[Proust's Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time, and Recognition in a La Recherche Du Temps Perdu]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/864847.Proust_s_Binoculars_A_Study_of_Memory_Time_and_Recognition_in_a_La_Recherche_Du_Temps_Perdu 3.00 6 15965 3.99 397 65 6324498 1 <![CDATA[Selected works of Alfred Jarry]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1236644039m/6324498.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6324498.Selected_works_of_Alfred_Jarry 4.00 4
Dynix#: 469064
NNBR#: 700291824
LCCN#: 63017002]]> 15965 3.99 397 65 53419 4.28 78 13 123052 0878466541 9780878466542 1 <![CDATA[The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171847854m/123052.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123052.The_Innocent_Eye_On_Modern_Literature_and_the_Arts 4.00 2 15965 3.99 397 65 1024034 0879590548 9780879590543 1 <![CDATA[Half Tame]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1024034.Half_Tame 5.00 1 15965 3.99 397 65