Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education and the Arts Hardcover - 1999

From the publisher

In this volume, eminent National Book Award-winning critic Roger Shattuck takes up the cudgel to affirm literature as a central field of study and personal reward. With incisive analysis, he explores the nature of intellectual craftsmanship in a society rampant with anti-intellectualism and pretension. Shattuck argues that American literary studies have embarked on a wayward course in recent decades. He shows how politics and theory have grown increasingly dominant and now threaten to eliminate the very category of literature. Looking to the past for guidance, Shattuck offers a powerful vision of a common literary and philosophical heritage. Whether commenting on Flaubert, Georgia O'Keeffe, V. S. Naipaul, the movies, or education, Shattuck explores the principles and values by which we can live together as one country and one culture at peace with our diversity. Roger Shattuck has served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, taught for many years at Boston University, and now resides in Vermont. He is the author of The Banquet Years, Marcel Proust (National Book Award, 1974), The Innocent Eye, and, most recently, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography.