Wednesday, January 21, 2015

The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers

The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers

So, even you require obligation from the company, you could not be puzzled more because publications The Fate Of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers will certainly always aid you. If this The Fate Of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers is your finest partner today to cover your work or job, you could as soon as possible get this book. Just how? As we have told previously, just visit the link that we offer below. The verdict is not only the book The Fate Of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers that you search for; it is exactly how you will certainly get several books to support your ability and also capability to have piece de resistance.

The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers

The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers



The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers

Free Ebook Online The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers

As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society.

Organizing his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers anatomizes the process by which they fall in and out of fashion and often confuse those who most ardently embrace them. In provocative encounters with authority, fidelity, "the other," pleasure, and a wide range of other topics, Boyers tells colorful stories about his own life and, in the process, studies the fate of ideas in a society committed to change and ill equipped to assess the losses entailed in modernity. Among the writers who appear in these pages are Susan Sontag and V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and J. M. Coetzee, as well as figures drawn from all walks of life, including unfaithful husbands, psychoanalysts, terrorists, and besotted beauty lovers.

The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #310483 in Books
  • Published on: 2015-09-08
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.00" w x 6.10" l, 1.10 pounds
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 280 pages
The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers

Review

The Fate of Ideas is a brilliant, highly original, and delightful book that achieves a unique balance between criticism and personal essay, revealing the author himself as both a decisive thinker and an appealingly flawed, divided human being. Looking at a wide range of ideas by peeling away attendant presuppositions and contradictions, Robert Boyers argues with friends, intellectual heroes, and respected elders while examining his own prejudices. Throughout we find ourselves in the company of a first-rate mind alert to changes in intellectual fashion and the quickness with which politically or aesthetically 'correct' assumptions harden into received ideas.

(Phillip Lopate, director (nonfiction) of the Writing Program, Columbia University School of the Arts, and author of Getting Personal: Selected Essays)

In a dance that is both demanding and exhilarating, Robert Boyers engages thinkers and ideas, insisting there are things worth arguing about that are larger and grander than the standard scholarly or academic discourse can get at. An elegant and courageous book.

(Mary Gordon, Mcintosh Professor, Barnard College, author of The Company of Women)

This book is a combination of memoir and cultural criticism, though all of the chapters shed light on the protean character of the author, a prominent cultural critic and―perhaps above all―the founder and longtime editor of the quarterly Salmagundi. Whatever form they take―some chapters are deeply personal, others are largely polemical―all are thought experiments, essays often ironic and self-deprecating, Emersonian in the sense that Robert Boyers is unabashed in his 'appetite for masters and masterpieces' that can become 'a constitutive aspect of my very being.' A superb and singular work.

(James Miller, director of liberal studies, graduate faculty, New School for Social Research, author of The Passion of Michel Foucault)

An attractive, original, subtle, and heartening book that combines the methods of the moral and personal essay with informal literary and cultural criticism.

(Richard Locke, Columbia University, author of Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels)

The 12 literary essays collected in this volume are bottomless wells of provocation and insight.... Readers who crave rich food for thought will find much to savor in this volume.

(Publisher's Weekly (starred review))

Boyers's intellectual rigor and literary acuity showcase the life's work of an individual deeply committed to the liberal arts. A timely collection.... Essential.

(Choice)

About the Author

Robert Boyers is professor of English at Skidmore College and founder and editor of the quarterly Salmagundi. He is also director of The New York State Summer Writers Institute. His many books include The Dictator's Dictation: The Politics of Novels and Novelists and a volume of short stories entitled Excitable Women, Damaged Men. His essays have appeared in Harper's, the New Republic, the Nation, Granta, the Yale Review, and many other magazines.


The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers

Where to Download The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers

Most helpful customer reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. A pleasant and thoughtful book By Amazon Customer Robert Boyers' comes across as so pleasant and engaging throughout that it would be hard not to enjoy these twelve essays. Each essay is a small meditation on a large topic, examples including Beauty, Fidelity or Modernism. Boyers illustrates each of these with anecdotes from his own life and, more prominently, with excerpts from literature and musings from other great thinkers.The most immediate impression of Boyers is of someone extremely well-read. At times the book gives the impression of an autumn stroll through campus with a thoughtful and kind professor. He is ruminating on some of life's big questions and inviting you to consider these questions yourself. Boyers clearly has thought deeply about the relationships between people and what we may owe one another. Reading this book was a reminder that there are great intellects in the world that are not necessarily sharp or condescending. Highly recommended.

See all 1 customer reviews... The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, AppraisalsBy Robert Boyers

No comments:

Post a Comment