Mark Edmundson

Edmundson's literary interests aren't as wide-ranging as you would think - he likes the Romantics, Freud, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Whitman, Emerson, etc. In the Romanticism class I took with him, all of these thinkers were touched on, with the occasional reference to Beck or the Notorious B.I.G. to appeal to the Gen Xers. I left the class with more to think about, which is a sign of good teaching. I got interested in John Keats especially, who is the least cosmic of the Romantic bunch, but probably the most gifted with language

This lucid defense of the humanities and critique of the corporate university feels weary. We have essentially lost this battle. There are no literary heroes held up by the mainstream to point the way forward. We are much more concerned with the fate of UVa's basketball team than about its soul as academic institution.

I am guilty of having the collector's mindset about my own intellectual pursuits, as evidenced by the relentless cataloguing of everything I read on this website. I have very rarely been transformed by a book, although Dostoevsky gets me there, as does Austen and Dickens, along with a lot of poetry (Dickinson, Yeats, Lowell). The trap in modern society is for easy answers, a Manichean polarization, enmity towards those who disagree. The humanities should be our shared culture, our shared heritage. Unfortunately, the academy has turned the liberal arts into another political battlefield. By doing so, they have muddied the waters and turned education into a political position instead of the process not only of soulmaking but also of citizenship. Everyone in American should read Huckleberry Finn and Invisible Man before they can join the conversation on race.

Let's save literature! Let's save our souls!… (més)

Why Read? is a compilation of the clever thoughts of others. Edmundson is constantly direct quoting, recalling or paraphrasing the intelligent works of Arthur Schoppenhauer, David Denby, David Rieff, de Man, Friedrich Schiller, Foucault, Frye, Henry James, Harold Bloom, Heidegger, James Edwards, Kierkegaard, Karen Armstrong, Jacques Derrida, Lionel Trilling, Marcel Proust, Matthew Arnold, Martha Nussbaum, Milan Kundera, Oscar Wilde, the Marquis de Sade, Paul Cantor, Paul Ricoeur, Sir Philip Sidney, Richard Rorty, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, Simon Frith, Stanley Fish, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Walter Jackson Bate, William B. Yeats, Wordsworth (among others), without a single footnote or bibliography, works cited page, or what have you. Sections on the connections to God, questioning God, and delving into the importance of critical thinking had me yawning. Is it deliberate that Edmundson's examples of his students are mostly female? Just curious.
My favorite sections are when Edmundson was drawing connections to humanism - finding the deep parallels between individual reality and literary imagination. Can we identify with Hamlet's situation? How does this relate to the here and now?… (més)