Splendid essays by Milton scholar and literary theorist Fish (Doing What Comes Naturally, 1990, etc.; English/Duke) that express his centrist, mediating, pragmatic position in the recent cultural wars over theory, politics, and the place of literature in society. The first ten essays here derive from debates that Fish participated in with Dinesh D'Souza during a tour of college campuses in which Fish assumed the liberal position defending tolerance, equality, and nondiscrimination against D'Souza's conservative appeal to transcendent values. In a clear, eloquent, personable—if relentlessly logical—style, Fish reveals the hidden and self-defeating agendas of both sides, the self-deluding coercions of liberalism especially. Essentially, he argues that liberals create what they set out to avoid: tyranny, discrimination, censorship. Fish concludes that free speech can't be legislated; instead, it's ``what is left over when a community has determined in advance what it does not want to hear.'' The rest of the text consists of the author's take on various academic issues—the impossibility of interdisciplinary studies; the ineffectualness of literary theory, especially neo-historicism, which, Fish says, is simply out of touch with the literature it's studying and the world it's trying to relate to. In a gracious lecture delivered on the occasion of an award from the Milton Society, Fish reveals his admiration for the great writers; in a cynical one, he warns of the self-defeating character of academics who are so uncomfortable with pleasure that they create the conditions for the contempt in which society sometimes holds them. The text concludes with an interview conducted by Gary Olson, in which Fish restates his pedagogical and critical principles. Fish offers here exactly what he argues for: clarity, integrity, conviction, the common place of common sense. (First serial to Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-19-508018-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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