In this new collection, Eugene Goodheart, scholar of English literature, essayist, and public intellectual, reveals himself in a way that will interest readers already familiar with his expansive body of work as well as those new to his writing. Rising above the particular, the essays focus on themes of universal importance. The opening essay, "Whistling in the Dark," is a meditation on the gravest of subjects: aging and mortality. The chapters that follow are a series of reflections on te...

What it means to be a Jew lies at the very heart of Confessions of a Secular Jew, a provocative memoir and a thoughtful speculation on the nature of Jewish identity and experience in an increasingly secular world. The legacy bequeathed to Eugene Goodheart was a "progressive" secular Yiddish education which identifi ed Jewish struggles against oppression with working class struggles against exploitation. In the vanguard was the Soviet Union. Goodheart's heroes were Moses, Bar Kochbah, Judah...

Complaints about the decline of critical standards in literature and culture in general have been voiced for much of the twentieth century. These have extended from F.R. Leavis's laments for a "lost center of intelligence and urbane spirit," to current opposition to the predominance of radical critical theory in contemporary literature departments. Humanist criticism, which has as its object the quality of life as well as works of art, may well lack authority in the contemporary world. Eve...

The US Constitution resists centralizing authority by granting equal power to the three branches of government, as well as the individual states. The risk inherent in the separation of powers is that the absence of a spirit of compromise can lead to the disintegration of the union. Eugene Good heart argues that the current union is in peril due to an unwillingness to cooperate on the part of contending parties. He explains how and why it has reached this point, while identifying common gro...

Politicians and pundits often scorn polarization and compromise—the intransigence of the former and the feebleness of the latter—without suggesting an alternative way. Polarization, when opposing forces are equal or close to equal in strength, leads to stalemate. Compromise threatens to betray one's conviction about what is essential. Ideally, a leader must combine conviction about what ought to be done with an open-minded awareness of unintended consequences.The social sciences are or sho...

The dominant view of D.H. Lawrence's work has long been that of F. R. Leavis, who confined Lawrence within an exclusively ethical and artistic tradition. In D.H. Lawrence: The Utopian Vision, Eugene Goodheart widens the context in which Lawrence should be understood to include European as well as English writers - Blake, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud among others.Goodheart shows that the characteristic impulse of Lawrence's principal discovery was the bodily or physical life...

In recent decades the humanities have been in thrall to postmodern skepticism, while Darwinists, brimming with confidence in the genuine progress they have made in the sciences of biology and psychology, have set their sights on rescuing the humanities from the ravages of postmodernism. In this volume, Eugene Goodheart attacks the neo-Darwinist approach to the arts and articulates a powerful defense of humanist criticism.E. O. Wilson, the distinguished Harvard biologist, has spoken...

An important debate in modern literary criticism concerns the exact relationship between the ancient epic and the novel. Both the epic and the most ambitious modern novels are large-scale attempts to present a comprehensive view of the world through the experience of a representative hero. However, in the older tradition the hero stood for the aspirations and highest ideals of his society. The protagonist of the modern novel is usually at odds with that society, whether as exile, active re...

Goethe once remarked that "every emancipation of the spirit is pernicious unless there is a corresponding growth of control." This remark may be taken as a motto for Eugene Goodheart's study of an aspect of the cultural history of the past two hundred years. In separate chapters on Rousseau, Stendhal, Goethe and Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Whitman, Lawrence, and Joyce, Goodheart discovers a community of concern which he calls the cult of the ego. All these writers examined here in one way or anot...