| Edition |
First edition. |
| Description |
xxii, 615 pages ; 21 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 599-604) and index. |
| Contents |
1. On a pragmatic view of life -- Toward a fateful serenity -- 2. On the two ways of knowing : history and science -- The search for truths -- History as counter-method and anti-abstraction -- The imagination of the real -- Cultural history : a synthesis -- Alfred North Whitehead -- William James : the mind as artist -- Thomas Beddoes, M.D. -- Science and scientism -- Myths for materialists -- 3. On what critics argue about -- Criticism : an art or a craft? -- The scholar-critic -- James Agate and his nine egos -- The grand pretense -- On sentimentality -- Samuel Butler -- On romanticism -- Dorothy Sayers -- John Jay Chapman -- Remembering Lionel Trilling -- 4. On language and style -- Rhetoric : what it is : why needed -- The retort circumstantial -- The necessity of a common tongue -- The word "man" -- On biography -- Venus at large : sexuality and the limits of literature -- Onoma, Onomato, Onomatwaddle -- 5. On some classics -- Swift, or man's capacity for reason -- Why Diderot? -- William Hazlitt -- How the romantics invented Shakespeare -- Bernard Shaw -- Goethe's Faust -- When the Orient was new : Byron, Kinglake, and Flaubert -- The permanence of Oscar Wilde -- Bagehot as historian -- Lincoln the literary artist -- The reign of William and Henry -- 6. On music and design -- Why opera? -- Is music unspeakable? -- Music for Europe : a travers chants -- To praise Varèse -- Delacroix -- Visual evidence of a new age -- Museum piece -- Why art must be challenged -- 7. On teaching and learning -- The art of making teachers -- Where the educational nonsense comes from -- Occupational disease : verbal inflation -- The centrality of reading -- The tyranny of testing -- History for beginners -- Of what use the classics today? -- The university's primary task -- The scholar is an institution -- Exeunt the humanities -- 8. On America past and present -- On baseball -- Race : fact or fiction? -- Thoreau the thorough impressionist -- The railroad -- The great switch -- Is Democratic theory for export? -- Administering and the law -- The three enemies of intellect -- An American commencement -- 9. On France and the French -- Paris in 1830 -- Food for the NRF -- French and its vagaries -- Flaubert's Dictionary of accepted ideas -- 10. On crime, true and make-believe -- The aesthetics of the criminous -- Rex Stout -- A catalogue of crime -- Why read crime fiction?-- The place and point of "true crime" -- Meditations on the literature of spying -- 11. A miscellany -- Definitions -- Jottings -- Clerihews -- Ars poetical. |
| Subject |
Civilization, Modern -- Historiography.
|
|
Civilization, Modern -- Philosophy.
|
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Civilization, Western -- Philosophy.
|
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Social history -- Philosophy.
|
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Criticism (Philosophy)
|
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Barzun, Jacques, 1907-2012 -- Political and social views.
|
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Culture.
|
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Humanities.
|
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Intellectual life -- History.
|
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Learning and scholarship -- History.
|
| Added Author |
Murray, Michael, 1941-
|
| Added Title |
Essays. Selections
|
| ISBN |
0066210194 |
|
