Product Description: Has American higher education become a dinosaur? Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for one hundred years, while faculties and student bodies have radically changed and technology has drastically transformed the way people produce and disseminate knowledge...read more

Product Description: Has American higher education become a dinosaur? Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for one hundred years, while faculties and student bodies have radically changed and technology has drastically transformed the way people produce and disseminate knowledge...read more

Product Description: This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work...read more

Product Description: Contemporary American politics has in recent years been much concerned with the idea of cultural divisions-between rich and poor, between black and white, between red states and blue states. But these divisions, no matter how severe, always serve to remind us of the attachments, allegiances, and convictions behind them that are never single but always torn...read more

A study of a literary success, and the forces that combine to create a successful literary movement, Discovering Modernism places T.S. Eliot in his cultural context to discover why his poetry and criticism answered the needs of a particular moment. Menand's analysis, which includes a reevaluation of the influence of Eliot's doctoral dissertation in philosophy on his later work, yields fresh readings of some familiar features of Eliot's style--the use of literary allusion, the valorization of "tradition," the critical formulae of the objective corrolative and the dissociation of sensibility, and the notes to The Waste Land. But this book is about more than T.S. Eliot. Because Menands's larger subject is the crisis in literature that produced Eliot and the entire Modernist movement, he examines the ways in which the literary values of the 19th century became problems for their 20th-century counterparts. With discussion of such topics as Conrad and the rise of professionalism, Darwinism and the late 19th century notion of style, Tennyson's posthumous reputation, and Pater and the Imagists, he contributes to our knowledge of the ties that bound Modernism to the 19th century, and sheds new light on how writers go about "making it new."

Product Description: This volume provides a thorough account of the critical tradition emerging with the modernist and avant-garde writers of the early twentieth century (Eliot, Pound, Stein, Yeats), continuing with the New Critics (Richards, Empson, Burke, Winters), and feeding into the influential work of Leavis, Trilling and others...read more

Edited by the author of The Metaphysical Club, a new collection of the finest nonfiction essays published over the past year incorporates the work of distinguished masters of the essay genre, including Kathryn Chetkovich, Jonathan Franzen, Kyoko Mori, and Cynthia Zarin, among others.

Edited by the author of The Metaphysical Club, a new collection of the finest nonfiction essays published over the past year incorporates the work of distinguished masters of the essay genre, including Kathryn Chetkovich, Jonathan Franzen, Kyoko Mori, and Cynthia Zarin, among others.

The author of The Metaphysical Club presents an intellectual and cultural history of America that draws connections between seemingly unrelated facets of American society, identifying the sources of key innovations while explaining how ideas became part of mainstream life. Reprint. 15,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

Written in the spirit of an idea about ideas, a narrative about personalities and American history is told through the story of an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1872 to talk about ideas and whose members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and their intellectual heir, John Dewey. Reprint. (view table of contents)

Written in the spirit of an idea about ideas, a narrative about personalities and American history is told through the story of an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872 to talk about ideas and whose members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce,and their intellectual heir, John Dewey. 35,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

Nine prominent academics, including Richard Rorty, Henry Louis Gates, Ronald Dworkin, and Evelyn Fox Keller, debate the impact of current controversies in the university--such as multi-culturalism and speech codes--on the academic tradition of free inquiry

(view table of contents)

Essays discuss America's founding, the original interventions behind the U.S. Constitution, civil rights, and domestic and foreign policy