As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century’s most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society.
Organizing his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers anatomizes the process by which they fall in and out of fashion and often confuse those who most ardently embrace them. In provocative encounters with authority, fidelity, ‘the other, ‘ pleasure, and a wide range of other topics, Boyers tells colorful stories about his own life and, in the process, studies the fate of ideas in a society committed to change and ill equipped to assess the losses entailed in modernity. Among the writers who appear in these pages are Susan Sontag and V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and J. M. Coetzee, as well as figures drawn from all walks of life, including unfaithful husbands, psychoanalysts, terrorists, and besotted beauty lovers.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Authority
2. Pleasure
3. Reading from the Life
4. Fidelity
5. Saving Beauty
6. My ‘Others’
7. Politics and the Novel
8. Realism
9. The Sublime
10. Psychoanalysis
11. Modernism
12. Judgment
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Robert Boyers is professor of English at Skidmore College and founder and editor of the quarterlySalmagundi. He is also director of The New York State Summer Writers Institute. His many books include
The Dictator’s Dictation: The Politics of Novels and Novelists and a volume of short stories entitled
Excitable Women, Damaged Men. His essays have appeared in
Harper’s, the
New Republic, the
Nation,
Granta, the
Yale Review, and many other magazines.
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