Jacques Barzun
20 Sep 2003 17:09French-American historian and educator, born 1907 into very modernist circles (his father disputed with another poet over the honor of having invented "simultaneous" poetry). He came to the States --- more specifically Columbia --- in the '20s for college and has been there ever since. He's an excellent writer, one of our last living men of letters, and was for decades one of the guiding lights of liberal education in this country, especially through the western civ. course he taught at Columbia. He's not a paragon, of course --- he's grown more conservative as he's grown older, he's never quite reconciled himself to Darwin, and he admires Pascal --- but even at his worst it's instructive to see how a witty, intelligent, well-informed and clear-thinking man went wrong, and at his best --- say, The House of Intellect --- he is superb.
William James. Romanticism. Modernism. Intellectuals. US Education. Detective stories and their aesthetic.
- Recommended:
- The House of Intellect
- Science, the Glorious Entertainment
- Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage
- God's Country and Mine
- The Teacher in America
- The Modern Researcher [My father went to college with the first edition, which explained library catalog cards in detail. In 1997 I picked up the fifth, which considers what you really want in a laptop. Considering all the supposed upheaveals of the last forty-five years, it is shocking how little Barzun has had to change.]
- The Energies of Art esp. "The Road to Abstraction" and "The Pleasures of Detection."
- Race, a Study in Superstition
- To read:
- Begin Here
- The bibliophile of the future
- Clio and the Doctors
- Critical Questions
- From Dawn to Decadence
- A Jacques Barzun Reader (ed. Michael Murray, who is preparing a biography)
- Three talks
