Jewish Writing and the Deep Places of the Imagination
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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 principles, Krupnick follows Lionel Trilling, Cynthia Ozick, Geoffrey Hartman, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and others into the elemental matters of life and death, sex and gender, power and vulnerability. The editors—Krupnick’s wife, Jean K. Carney, and literary critic Mark Shechner—have also included earlier essays and introductions that link Krupnick’s work with the “deep places” of his own imagination.
Foreword"A shit-filled life" : Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater15"We are here to be humiliated" : Philip Roth's recent fiction40Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth, and Holocaust testimonies Cynthia Ozick : embarrassments72Lionel Trilling and the deep places of the imagination99The Trillings : a marriage of true minds?125Lionel Trilling and the politics of style138Philip Rahv : "he never learned to swim"157Alfred Kazin and Irvain Howe178The two worlds of cultural criticism192Edmund Wilson and gentile philo-semitism209Listmania in Humboldt's gift225Assimilation in recent Jewish American autobiographies233Revisiting Morrie : were his last words too good to be true?255The art of the obituary261Why are English departments still fighting the culture wars?271Upon retirement276Afterword287Biographical summary337
