From small questions of taste to large questions concerning the nature of existence, intellectual debate takes up much of our time. In this work literary critic Arthur Krystal examines what most commentators ignore: the role of temperament and taste in the forming of aesthetic and ideological opinions. In provocative essays about reading and writing, about the relation between life and literature, about knowledge and certainty, about God and death, and about his own gradual disaffection with the literary scene, Krystal demonstrates that opposing points of view are based more on innate predilections than on disinterested thought or analysis. Not beholden to any fashionable theory or political agenda, Krystal interrogates the usual suspects in the cultural wars from an independent, though not impartial, vantage point. Clearly personal and unabashedly belletrist, his essays ask important questions. What makes culture one thing and not another? What inspires aesthetic values? What drives us to make comparisons? And how does a bias for one kind of evidence as opposed to another contribute to the form and content of intellectual argument?
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Essayist, reviewer, and editor Krystal (A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling) pulls no punches in dispatching academic critics who view works of literature primarily as "semiotic tracts that reflect all sorts of nasty, royalist, elitist, patriarchal, sexist, and imperialist sympathies." He sees the activities of writing and reading as deeply connected to basic human questions of life, death, religion, value, and taste. In graceful, conversational prose, he both argues and demonstrates his points, easily combining his knowledge of history and philosophy with the personal to give readers a view of an engaged mind. The essays collected here have previously appeared in American Scholar, the New York Times Book Review, and Harper's. The most famous of them, "Closing the Books: A Once-Devoted Reader Arrives at the End of the Story," attempts to come to terms with his own loss of interest in reading. Is it his age, he wonders, or the age? Recommended for academic libraries.
Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From the Back Cover
"Arthur Krystal's invigorating collection of essays is a kind of autobiography, that of a richly furnished intelligence scanning the current world of literature and opinion, philosophies and fads, convictions and posturing-all this in a style that flows and sparkles with half-submerged wit and flashing imagery." -Jacques Barzun
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A thoroughly pleasurable book on books on reading,
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This review is from: Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature (Hardcover)
I begin by acknowledging that I know the author and that our favorite pasttime over the years has been disagreeing with each other. With this book, however, I can find nothing to disagree with. The style is both elegant and chummy at the same time, and there is wit and cleverness on every page, and judicious quotation. The prose is classically balanced, the range of thought satisfyingly large and capacious, and the sharpness of opinion immensely provoking. I have not read a more satisfying book in ages.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Essays on Life and Literature,
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This review is from: Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature (Hardcover)
These sixteen essays, culled from the last fifteen years of the last century, hold up fairly well here at the end of the first decade of the new millennium, where it would seem that all contemporary essays concerning writing and literature are required to contend with the death of publishing. Mr. Krystal, writing for Harper's and The American Scholar, among others, hadn't reached that point yet, and was free to consider other aspects of the writing and reading life. That in itself is refreshing -- although even as he concentrates on universal topics, there is still a certain amount of age clinging to these pieces.That is probably the severest criticism I have with this collection -- many of Mr. Krystal's observations concern impressions of the cultural mindset in relationship to literature, and I do think that mindset has subtly shifted in the quarter of a century since some of these essays were written. (Those who, like me, have a hard time believing that 1986 was twenty-five years ago will perhaps not notice this as much. Those who think that twenty-five years ago is, like, so last century, will probably think this 'subtle' shift is much more striking.) The collection begins with pieces that are reflective: Mr. Krystal received a bit of notoriety in the mid-nineties for an essay called 'Closing the Books: A Devoted Reader Arrives at the End of the Story', which detailed his loss of interest in reading. This is the essay that leads the rest, followed by others about Mr. Krystal's ruminations on knowledge, death, religion, and those writers and their stories which create life-long readers. These first half a dozen or so essays are designed to entertain, which they do. There seems to be a shift as the collection moves forward though, away from general interest topics (although Mr. Krystal keeps his light tone), and toward more academic evaluations of the philosophy of Art - specifically ideas weighing taste and temperament, imagination and poetry, and literary theory as well as the absence of metaphysical argument in contemporary literature. These essays were significantly more difficult than the earlier ones, at least to this reader, though not impossible. Mr. Krystal brings a wide range of historical figures and concepts to bear in these latter pieces, some more familiar to me than others, and though he supplies some context, he is writing for an audience who already has an interest in these subjects, and who also share a basic literary literacy, so to speak. I don't want to imply that they are full of opaque jargon and aimed at scholars; rather that the venue isn't designed to deliver much background, so the starting point for Mr. Krystal's ideas assume a common foundational knowledge of the topics he addresses. Similar to single-author short story collections, books of essays have their ups and downs. If forced to pick, I would probably single out the first two essays as most enjoyable, but I thought nearly all of them brought something to the table. Several sparked quite a bit of thought on my part, which I find invaluable. I've noticed that Mr. Krystal has two more collections out since this earlier one; based on what I've read here, I look forward to reading any other agitations he's had since the turn of the century.
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