Louis Menand
English Professor, Harvard University
Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. His areas of interest include 19th and 20th century cultural history. His books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Metaphysical Club" (2001), "Pragmatism: A Reader" (1996), and "Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context" (1987). His most recent volume, "The Marketplace of Ideas," was published by W. W. Norton & Co. in 2010. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books and other publications.
The kind of literary criticism that Lionel Trilling practiced, which assumed that national literatures reflected deep national values, is dead now.
“There’s no point in going into a field like English literature unless you’re going to have fun with it.”
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The Harvard critic recalls feeling genuinely anxious about how things would turn out for the hero of “The Magic Mountain.”
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Creative writing programs have left a dominant stamp on American literature in recent decades. The Harvard professor is glad they’re around.
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Louis Menand recalls the most vehement reactions his essays have ever gotten—including one from a reader who didn’t realize Menand agreed with him.
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4 min
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Louis Menand isn’t sure the cognitive science approach to literature has yielded much of interest so far, but thinks there may be “some surprises around the corner.”
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Not on purpose, says the “Marketplace of Ideas” author. But the system is starting to hurt them nonetheless.
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The “Marketplace of Ideas” author suggests steps American colleges can take to become more ideologically diverse.
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3 min
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The “problem of general education” haunts any college trying to design a core curriculum, but standardizing across schools is a poor solution.
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4 min
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Whether we’re in postmodernism, post-postmodernism, or some other phase, one thing we’re not in is cultural decline.
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The kind of literary criticism that Lionel Trilling practiced, which assumed that national literatures reflected deep national values, is dead now.
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5 min
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The audience that the New Yorker critic has in mind is “somebody who’s like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.”
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A conversation with the Harvard University English professor.
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28 min
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