This month’s homepage quote comes from an excellent book, just released last fall, called A Literary Education by Joseph Epstein. The author was a long-time professor of English at Northwestern University, has written over 20 books, and has written for numerous magazines, such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic. The book is a collection of essays over the course of several decades, in which he provides illuminating commentary on literature, university life, intellectualism, and even his own background. Part memoir, part cultural critique, Epstein boldly, yet cleverly, pokes fun at many of the English field’s sacred cows. Essay titles include “The Death of the Liberal Arts” and “The Academic Zoo: Theory—in Practice” in the section on education; “My Fair Language” and “Heavy Sentences” in the section on writing and speaking techniques; “Culture and Capitalism” and “Educated by Novels” in the section on the arts; among many others.
A Literary Education is quite a large book, so if you have limited time, you would benefit most, I believe, from reading Parts One, Four, Five, and Six. While the rest is also good, those sections are most specifically about the field of English. Epstein’s writing is infinitely better than I could ever describe it, so I will offer a few excerpts here as a sample of his work. Here are just a few passages (of many) that particularly stood out to me:
On how literature shapes an understanding of humanity by embracing individuality: “A literary education teaches that human nature is best, if always incompletely, understood through the examination of individual cases, with nothing more stimulating than those cases that provide exceptions that prove no rule—the unique human personality, in other words.”
On how books such as The Cambridge History of the American Novel paint a rather dour picture of literature and its relationship with this country: “A stranger, freshly arrived from another planet, if offered as his introduction to the United States only this book, would come away with a picture of a country founded on violence and expropriation, stoked through its history by every kind of prejudice and class domination, and populated chiefly by one or another kind of victim, with time out only for the mental sloth and apathy brought on by life lived in the suburbs and the characterless glut of American late capitalism. [This perspective] is part of the reigning ethos of the current-day English Department.”
On the sad turn literary studies has taken in recent decades: “Such is the goofiness of current academic life that restating the obvious—that most great literature is indeed separable from politics, that true culture is above gender, race, and class, that the point of view literature teaches is inherently anti-system, anti-theory, and skeptical of all ideas that do not grow out of particular cases also known as poems, stories, essays, and plays—restating all this has become nearly a full-time job and often a wearying one.”
On the liberal arts: “The death of liberal arts education would constitute a serious subtraction. Without it, we shall no longer have a segment of the population that has a proper standard with which to judge true intellectual achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion of what constitutes an educated man or woman, or why one work of art is superior to another, or what in life is serious and what is trivial.”
On the importance of understanding language: “Language is one of the primary ways we have of taking one another’s measure, and as such measures go it is not entirely an inferior one. A person’s speech is often a strong clue to his region and his social class, his choice of vocabulary to his education and point of view.”
On maturity in writing: “Good writers rarely arrive with the precocity of visual artists or musical performers or composers. Time is required to attain a point of view of sufficient depth to result in true style.”
On deep thinking: “Only years later did I realize that quickness of response—on which 95 percent of education is based—is beside the point, and is required only of politicians, emergency-room physicians, lawyers in courtrooms, and salesmen. Serious intellectual effort requires slow, usually painstaking thought, often with wrong roads taken along the way to the right destination, if one is lucky enough to arrive there.”
On the entitlement of youth: “So often in my literature classes students told me what they ‘felt’ about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared about what they felt; the trick was to discover not one’s feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power....I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.”
On teaching students: “Of the thousands of inane student evaluations I received...the only one that stays in my mind read, ‘I did well in this course; I would have been ashamed not to have done.’ How I wish I knew what it was that I did to induce this useful shame in that student, so that I might have done it again and again!
Epstein’s wit and wisdom are as refreshing as they are insightful. Reading his prose is like hanging out with your incredibly intelligent and funny grandfather, who just happens to be a renowned literary scholar. A quick joke is always lurking, waiting to emerge from beneath the layers of knowledge and experience. You have to work to keep up with him, but you’ll be glad you did. This book is a must read for anyone in higher education that works in English specifically or the liberal arts in general. Enjoy!
A Literary Education is quite a large book, so if you have limited time, you would benefit most, I believe, from reading Parts One, Four, Five, and Six. While the rest is also good, those sections are most specifically about the field of English. Epstein’s writing is infinitely better than I could ever describe it, so I will offer a few excerpts here as a sample of his work. Here are just a few passages (of many) that particularly stood out to me:
On how literature shapes an understanding of humanity by embracing individuality: “A literary education teaches that human nature is best, if always incompletely, understood through the examination of individual cases, with nothing more stimulating than those cases that provide exceptions that prove no rule—the unique human personality, in other words.”
On how books such as The Cambridge History of the American Novel paint a rather dour picture of literature and its relationship with this country: “A stranger, freshly arrived from another planet, if offered as his introduction to the United States only this book, would come away with a picture of a country founded on violence and expropriation, stoked through its history by every kind of prejudice and class domination, and populated chiefly by one or another kind of victim, with time out only for the mental sloth and apathy brought on by life lived in the suburbs and the characterless glut of American late capitalism. [This perspective] is part of the reigning ethos of the current-day English Department.”
On the sad turn literary studies has taken in recent decades: “Such is the goofiness of current academic life that restating the obvious—that most great literature is indeed separable from politics, that true culture is above gender, race, and class, that the point of view literature teaches is inherently anti-system, anti-theory, and skeptical of all ideas that do not grow out of particular cases also known as poems, stories, essays, and plays—restating all this has become nearly a full-time job and often a wearying one.”
On the liberal arts: “The death of liberal arts education would constitute a serious subtraction. Without it, we shall no longer have a segment of the population that has a proper standard with which to judge true intellectual achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion of what constitutes an educated man or woman, or why one work of art is superior to another, or what in life is serious and what is trivial.”
On the importance of understanding language: “Language is one of the primary ways we have of taking one another’s measure, and as such measures go it is not entirely an inferior one. A person’s speech is often a strong clue to his region and his social class, his choice of vocabulary to his education and point of view.”
On maturity in writing: “Good writers rarely arrive with the precocity of visual artists or musical performers or composers. Time is required to attain a point of view of sufficient depth to result in true style.”
On deep thinking: “Only years later did I realize that quickness of response—on which 95 percent of education is based—is beside the point, and is required only of politicians, emergency-room physicians, lawyers in courtrooms, and salesmen. Serious intellectual effort requires slow, usually painstaking thought, often with wrong roads taken along the way to the right destination, if one is lucky enough to arrive there.”
On the entitlement of youth: “So often in my literature classes students told me what they ‘felt’ about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared about what they felt; the trick was to discover not one’s feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power....I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.”
On teaching students: “Of the thousands of inane student evaluations I received...the only one that stays in my mind read, ‘I did well in this course; I would have been ashamed not to have done.’ How I wish I knew what it was that I did to induce this useful shame in that student, so that I might have done it again and again!
Epstein’s wit and wisdom are as refreshing as they are insightful. Reading his prose is like hanging out with your incredibly intelligent and funny grandfather, who just happens to be a renowned literary scholar. A quick joke is always lurking, waiting to emerge from beneath the layers of knowledge and experience. You have to work to keep up with him, but you’ll be glad you did. This book is a must read for anyone in higher education that works in English specifically or the liberal arts in general. Enjoy!