Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education and the Arts [Hardcover]

Roger Shattuck (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1999

Roger Shattuck reaffirms literature as a central field of study and personal reward. With incisive analysis, he explores the nature of intellectual craftsmanship, defends art's moral anti-intellectualism and philistine pretension. He argues that, in recent years, American literary studies have embarked on a wayward course, and he shows how politics and theory have grown increasingly dominant. Looking to the past for guidance, Shattuck offers a powerful vision of a common literary and philosophical heritage. Whether commenting on Flaubert, Foucault, "Pulp Fiction", Georgia O'Keeffe or V.S. Naipaul, he presents a stirring, humane synthesis of the principles and values by which we can live at peace with diversity.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In 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

From Publishers Weekly

Written over the past 15 years, this gathering of retired Boston University professor Shattuck's essays and reviews begins with a vociferous section on the education wars, leveling shots at cultural relativism and the politicization of education. In 1994, at the founding session of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, of which Shattuck was later president, the author read "Nineteen Theses on Literature," which distilled his beliefs in a traditional academic approach based on a faith in authors and their works. The theses are reproduced here, along with critiques of other books on education, as well as musings on reading, teaching, language and thought. Shattuck's tone is sometimes polemical, but the essays that follow are his own best defense. In pieces on Manet, impressionism, futurism, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp ("the court jester of modernism"), he demonstrates the keen insight and fluid prose produced by a deep and broad education, strongly focused (on early 20th-century French culture) and sophisticated, yet open to unexpected correspondences and plainspoken analysis. His affinity for figures like Mallarm?, who was both a dutiful citizen and a revolutionary poet, is a reminder that, despite some conservative views on education, Shattuck has always been a champion of the new and experimental in art. From The Banquet Years (1955) to the NBA-winning Marcel Proust (1974) to Forbidden Knowledge (1996), he has blazed his own intellectual trail, and readers will welcome this latest foray into the groves of art and academe. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (September 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393048071
• ISBN-13: 978-0965011426
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,107,341 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reason rendered eloquently, December 28, 1999

By 

Mika Fischer (Mount Baker, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education and the Arts (Hardcover)

As with his previous works, such as FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE and THE INNOCENT EYE, Roger Shattuck manages to cover many topics in his new book. There is no thematic link between the essays--it is enough that Shattuck writes well about each subject. Shattuck is, along with William Pritchard, Denis Donoghue, and Andrew Delbanco, one of our most perspicacious and eloquent critics, as he is equally adept at analyzing a writer's words (such as in his essay on Mallarme's poetry) or a social phenomenon (such as in his essay "Radical Skepticisim and How We Got Here"). The clarity of his writing prompts one to question the value of the opaque prose produced by many academics in our age.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Essays on Culture, Literature and the Arts, April 22, 2002

By 

"botatoe" (Albany, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education and the Arts (Hardcover)

"Candor & Perversion" collects nearly forty of Roger Shattuck's previously published essays on a broad range of topics in education, literature and the arts. Nearly all of these essays were published after 1985, predominantly in Salmagundi, The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. It is an outstanding collection of essays by a scholar of wide-ranging, thoughtful and sober intelligence.

The collection is divided into two parts. The first part, "Intellectual Craftsmanship," contains a series of polemical essays that deal with topics generally subsumed in recent years under the term "Culture Wars." In this part, Shattuck stakes out his position clearly in a number of essays dealing with the proper role of education and the importance of the canon. Thus, in the essay "Nineteen Theses on Literature," Shattuck states that, "we have brought ourselves to a great deal of perplexity about the basic role of education." This perplexity arises from the question of whether education's proper role should be "[to] socialize the young within an existing culture and offer them the means to succeed within that culture" or, in the alternative, "[to] give to the young the means to challenge and overthrow the existing culture, presumably in order to achieve a better life." Shattuck's response is in favor of the former, choosing a conservative view of education's role. In doing so, he essentially resolves this question consistent with a position he articulates in another of his essays, "Education, Higher and Lower," where he states that, "some of us have come to believe that it is possible, even necessary, to be liberal in political matters and conservationist in cultural matters."

These polemical pieces on the role of education are followed by a number of essays that explore such topics as "The Spiritual in Art," "How We Think at the Movies" (where he explores, among other things, whether thinking is possible without language), "Life Before Language: Nathalie Sarraute" (where he examines Sarraute's attempts to capture, in fiction, mental life as it exists before it "gets caught and stifled in the rough net of conventional language"), "Michel Foucault," and "Radical Skepticism and How We Got There." In all of these essays, Shattuck explores, with erudition and balance, a range of topics that have been prone in recent years to irrational polemics.

The second part of the collection, "A Critics Job of Work," contains essays that are best described as literary journalism. In a series of essays under the broad title "Tracking the Avant Guard in France," Shattuck explores the biographies and artistic significance of a range of artists and writers, including Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, Sarah Bernhardt, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau. The most telling of his essays in this part of the book is titled "From Aestheticism to Fascism," where Shattuck calmly proffers the lineage that ran from the "antinomian, decadent aestheticism" of the "art for art's sake" movement to the 'irrationalism, racism and nationalism that produced the most vicious and destructive aberration of modern times' in Germany and Italy.

The final essays in the collection are broadly grouped under the title "America, Africa and Elsewhere." Here, Shattuck explores a number of writers, including Mary Settle, Arthur Miller, Octavio Paz, V. S. Naipaul, and Leopold Senghor, as well as the artistic significance of the collaboration between Stieglitz and O'Keefe. These essays are wide ranging, insightful and balanced. The last of these essays, "Scandal and Stereotypes on Broadway: The New Puritanism," seemingly comes full circle from the opening essay of the book insofar as Shattuck reiterates his culturally conservative position in a stinging review of "Angels in America," stating that it was a play for which he was ashamed of himself for not having walked out. In Shattuck's words, the play "represents Puritanism inverted."

"Candor & Perversion" reaffirms Roger Shattuck's position as one of America's foremost cultural commentators. If you're interested in the polemics that have engulfed education, literature and the arts in the past decade, I can only say: read this book! You may not agree with Shattuck, but you will find his intelligent and careful reasoning regarding these issues a refreshing change from the often muddled and irrational posturing that characterizes much writing on these very important subjects.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely wonderful collection of essays and critiques, October 31, 1999

By 

Jeffrey Arp ([e-mail]) (Fremont, NE) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education and the Arts (Hardcover)

This is a great book that attempts to see through our modern educational and literary theories in order to reach a more truthful and substantial way of thinking about how we educate the mind through reading, writing and literature.

This isn't a perfect book. At times Shattuck relies much too heavily on what I would call "crutch" artists (Marcel Proust and Jean Arp being two of them), and at other times he seems almost guilty of nepotism in his applauding of the work done by close friends. However, the overall success of the book is in opening the reader to entertain less mainstream or popularly-accepted ideas that eventually may bring about a better educational system and more engaging and critical readers of literature in America.

I don't feel the book is quite as revolutionary as the author expects, nor as "anti-pc" or "anti-liberal" as many readers might first suggest.

Instead, the book works best as a tool through which the reader is more fully exposed to the current debates on education, literature, and what it means for something to be "art" or for a person to be an "artist."