A Jacques Barzun Reader

by Barzun, Jacques; Murray, Michael; Murray, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780066210193
• ISBN10: 0066210194
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-12-06
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Throughout his career Jacques Barzun, author of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Award Finalist From Dawn to Decadence, has always been known as a witty and graceful essayist, one who combines a depth of knowledge and a rare facility with words. Now Michael Murray has carefully selected eighty of Barzun's most inventive, accomplished, and insightful essays, and compiled them in one impressive volume. With subjects ranging from history to baseball to crime novels, A Jacques Barzun Reader is a feast for any reader.

Author Biography

Born in France in 1907, Jacques Barzun came to the United States in 1920. After graduating from Columbia College, he joined the faculty of the university, becoming Seth Low Professor of History and, for a decade, Dean of Faculties and Provost. A finalist of the National Book Awards, he received the Gold Medal for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he was twice president. He lives in San Antonio, Texas

Table of Contents

Introduction	xiv
by Michael Murray
On a Pragmatic View of Life
Toward a Fateful Serenity	3	(12)
On the Two Ways of Knowing: History and Science
The Search for Truths	15	(4)
History as Counter-Method and Anti-Abstraction	19	(7)
The Imagination of the Real	26	(1)
Cultural History: A Synthesis	27	(7)
Alfred North Whitehead	34	(1)
William James: The Mind as Artist	35	(4)
Thomas Beddoes	39	(10)
Science and Scientism	49	(20)
Myths for Materialists	69	(10)
On What Critics Argue About
Criticism: An Art or a Craft?	79	(8)
The Scholar-Critic	87	(5)
James Agate and His Nine Egos	92	(11)
The Grand Pretense	103	(4)
On Sentimentality	107	(1)
Samuel Butler	108	(6)
On Romanticism	114	(2)
Dorothy Sayers	116	(4)
John Jay Chapman	120	(9)
Remembering Lionel Trilling	129	(20)
On Language and Style
Rhetoric---What It Is; Why Needed	149	(7)
The Retort Circumstantial	156	(4)
The Necessity of a Common Tongue	160	(8)
The Word ``Man''	168	(4)
On Biography	172	(3)
Venus at Large: Sexuality and the Limits of Literature	175	(11)
Onoma-Onomato-Onomatwaddle	186	(7)
On Some Classics
Swift, or Man's Capacity for Reason	193	(10)
Why Diderot?	203	(10)
William Hazlitt	213	(3)
How the Romantics Invented Shakespeare	216	(15)
Bernard Shaw	231	(4)
Goethe's Faust	235	(15)
When the Orient Was New: Byron, Kinglake, and Flaubert	250	(22)
The Permanence of Oscar Wilde	272	(12)
Bagehot as Historian	284	(9)
Lincoln the Literary Artist	293	(11)
The Reign of William and Henry	304	(19)
On Music and Design
Why Opera?	323	(1)
Is Music Unspeakable?	324	(13)
Music for Europe: A Travers Chants	337	(17)
To Praise Varese	354	(4)
Delacroix	358	(4)
Visual Evidence of a New Age	362	(4)
Museum Piece 1967	366	(8)
Why Art Must Be Challenged	374	(13)
On Teaching and Learning
The Art of Making Teachers	387	(4)
Where the Educational Nonsense Comes From	391	(1)
Occupational Disease: Verbal Inflation	392	(4)
The Centrality of Reading	396	(5)
The Tyranny of Testing	401	(3)
History for Beginners	404	(8)
Of What Use the Classics Today?	412	(11)
The University's Primary Task	423	(1)
The Scholar Is an Institution	424	(2)
Exeunt the Humanities	426	(11)
On America Past and Present
On Baseball	437	(6)
Race: Fact or Fiction?	443	(4)
Thoreau the Thorough Impressionist	447	(18)
The Railroad	465	(5)
The Great Switch	470	(3)
Is Democratic Theory for Export?	473	(15)
Administering and the Law	488	(4)
The Three Enemies of Intellect	492	(17)
An American Commencement	509	(10)
On France and The French
Paris in 1830	519	(20)
Food for the NRF	539	(6)
French and Its Vagaries	545	(8)
Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas	553	(10)
On Crime, True and Make-Believe
The Aesthetics of the Criminous	563	(1)
Rex Stout	564	(3)
A Catalogue of Crime	567	(4)
Why Read Crime Fiction?	571	(7)
The Place and Point of ``True Crime''	578	(3)
Meditations on the Literature of Spying	581	(10)
A Miscellany
Definitions	591	(2)
Jottings	593	(2)
Clerihews	595	(2)
Ars Poetica	597	(2)
Bibliography	599	(6)
Index of Names	605