Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest.(Brief Article)

Eva T. H. Brann, tutor and former dean of St. John's College, Annapolis, eloquently defines and defends the idea of liberal education in "The American College as the Place for Liberal Learning," Daedalus (Winter 1999).

Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin (Pantheon Books, New York, 1999), is a compendium of short, fresh pieces on individual classics plus a marvelous essay defining the term.

Knights of the Brush: The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape, James F. Cooper, foreword by Frederick Turner (Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1999). A beautiful, vitalizing study of the Hudson River School of painters by a writer who also counters the debased art criticism of recent decades.

Sanford Pinsker offers an engaging survey of American academic novels starting with Hawthorne in "Who Cares if Roger Ackroyd Gets Tenure?" Partisan Review (Summer 1999). John Podhoretz, in "The Old College Try: PC Resurrects the Academic Novel," Weekly Standard (22 May 2000), brings us up to date on the brace of novels that emerged last season dealing more specifically with political correctness, among them J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Philip Roth's The Human Stain, and Francine Prose's Blue Angel.

Tom Wolfe's "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists," Harper's (June 2000) skewers present-day humanities departments "as hives of abstruse doctrine." This article is a warmup for Wolfe's forthcoming novel about, what else, the politically correct university.

In "Intellectuals--Public and Otherwise," Commentary (May 2000), Joseph Epstein connects the decline of the traditional intellectual to the expansion of the university and the birth of a new breed: "the public intellectual, a figure who as likely as not retains all or most of the political attitudes of the 60s, suitably updated for the moment, and who has become adept at packaging them in fancy academic dressing. These are the Edward Saids and Ronald Dworkins of our time, the Richard Rortys and Cornel Wests, the Martha Nussbaums and Stanley Fishes, the Catharine MacKinnons and Peter Singers."

The Intercollegiate Review (Fall 1999) contains several articles on teaching, from the suitably grim to the determinedly ameliorative to the glowingly inspirational.