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...
thinking students kind
Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.
writing people kind
If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.
lines trends be-kind
Cognitive science is a rapidly developing area, so it could be that there are some surprises around the corner. That does seem to be kind of where the trend line is leading.
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.
believe thinking appreciate
I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.
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.