Louis Menand
Louis Menand
Louis Menandis an American critic and essayist, best known for his book The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America...
believe thinking ideas
I think that the idea that there's such a thing as a national literature that's somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul or culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really believes in anymore.
years careers ideas
Getting faculties to come to a consensus about something that they've never really thought about or had to worry about in their careers before can be a rather slow process and a long process, it certainly was the case at Harvard, and it's the case with most of the general education curricula that I know of, it takes four or five years just to get everybody on board with one idea.
writing oddities ideas
One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.
mean organization ideas
You want diversity in any intellectual organization. I mean, that's how good ideas arise.
ideas limits
There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.
met particular toward warmth
When I met him, I didn't feel a particular warmth toward him.
figured hard
He's got everything all figured out. It was hard to get him off track.
art thinking people
I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.
strong thinking trying
I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular.
thinking body curriculum
I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.
college views body
My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.
criticism literature want
One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but one of the functions of that is basically the sort of Consumer Reports function of letting readers know whether this is something they want to read.
thinking issues taste
I don't think that taste should be the decider of moral issues.
jobs numbers people
The job of the critic, as it might have been conceived in the 1950's or 1960's, was some kind of role of moral arbiter for people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, fairly educated, well-placed people.