Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature

Description

We disagree. From small questions of taste to large questions concerning the nature of existence, intellectual debate takes up much of our time. In this book the respected literary critic Arthur Krystal examines what most commentators ignore: the role of temperament and taste in the forming of aesthetic and ideological opinions. In provocative essays about reading and writing, about the relation between life and literature, about knowledge and certainty, about God and death, and about his own gradual disaffection with the literary scene, Krystal demonstrates that opposing points of view are based more on innate predilections than on disinterested thought or analysis. Not beholden to any fashionable theory or political agenda, Krystal interrogates the usual suspects in the cultural wars from an independent, though not impartial, vantage point. Clearly personal and unabashedly belletrist, his essays ask important questions. What makes culture one thing and not another? What inspires aesthetic values? What drives us to make comparisons? And how does a bias for one kind of evidence as opposed to another contribute to the form and content of intellectual argument? Acknowledgments Contents Author’s Note 1. Closing the Books: A Devoted Reader Arrives at the End of the Story 2. H. C. Witwer and Me: The Making of a Reader 3. Stop the Presses: A Petition for Less Writing 4. What Do You Know? What Don’t You Know? 5. Death, It’s What Ails You 6. Why Smart People Believe in God 7. Taste, Too, Is an Art 8. The Rule of Temperament 9. Art and Craft 10. Certitudes 11. What Happened? The Rise and Fall of Theory 12. How We Write When We Write About Writing 13. Looking for a Good Argument: Argument and the Novel 14. Just Imagine: Three Hundred Years of the Creative Imagination 15. Going, Going, Gone: The Place of Poetry in American Letters 16. The Writing Life Credits