"When he learned he had ALS and roughly two years to live, literary critic Mark Krupnick returned to the writers who had been his lifelong conversation partners and asked with renewed intensity: how do you live as a Jew when, mostly, you live in your head? The evocative and sinuous essays collected here are the products of this inquiry. In his search for durable intellectual principles, Krupnick examines the New York intellectuals and other writers who guided him in creating a self through reading and writing."--Jacket.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 349-354) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:
"A shit-filled life": Philip Roth's Sabbath's theater -- "We are here to be humiliated": Philip Roth's recent fiction -- Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth, and Holocaust testimonies -- Cynthia Ozick: embarrassments -- Lionel Trilling and "the deep places of the imagination" -- The Trillings : a marriage of true minds? -- Lionel Trilling and the politics of style -- Philip Rahv : "he never learned to swim" -- Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe -- The two worlds of cultural criticism -- Edmund Wilson and gentile philo-Semitism -- Listmania in Humboldt's gift -- Assimilation in recent American Jewish autobiographies -- Revisiting Morrie: were his last words too good to be true? -- The art of the obituary -- Why are English departments still fighting the culture wars? -- Upon retirement.
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