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Grounds for Comparison
[Man, Paul de] Levin, Harry. Grounds for Comparison. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1972. 8°. 423 pages. Original Hardcover in protective Mylar. Very good condition. Even though not shown, this book comes from the library of Paul de Man.
433 pages, Hardcover
First published December 31, 1972
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November 19, 2017
I quoted this in my Ph.D. thesis (1976), as well as in preparing for my interview in Comp. Lit. with the UC Berkeley, at the Kentucky Language Conference a couple years earlier. I had the honor to sit beside Harry Levin over lunch at a literary conference, probably Shakespeare Association of America. (At that, we mostly discussed my great Amherst College teacher--and Chair-- Theodore Baird, who like Levin had studied with Kittredge, and who was famously critical of Harvard for not reading daily freshman papers etc, as Baird's AmColl English Department did.)
Levin's book is a great survey of the humanities in historical perspective, how Seneca first distinguished "artes liberales," the studies of a landowner who need not learn skills for work, from "artes mechanicae." Seneca said the liberal arts offered no mercenary reward, so they were "worthy of free men, and indeed were agents of liberation"(26).
Rhetoric in the 13C took on the expedient, practical use as letter-writing (ars dictaminis), so that
the U of Paris had become a business school, according to Henri d'Adeli. The classics had retreated to the U of Orleans. In America, James Russell Lowell said the university should teach nothing useful, while Herbert Spencer disagreed, said then the child learning Latin becomes "Just like the Orinoco Indian paints and tatoos himself."
The humanist ideal, the cortegiano or the honnete homme, equally adept at arms and letters, "whom Don Quixote strove to emulate"(32). Don Quixote, the "roman de les romans" (Thibaudet) but also "le roman contre les romans." (See "The Quixotic Principle" in this book, pp229ff.) Levin, "Don Quixote, in its intention and impact, constituted an overt act of criticism"(79). Cervantes was one of Melville's demigods, and Faulkner reread Don Quixote every year"(238). Pascal said "Le vrai eloquence se moque de l'éloquence"(241), which Levin adapts to the true novel which mocks the novel.
"English Studies were the poor mans classics, as D.J.Palmer has shown...and they got their start in dissenting academies and mechanics' institutes." (p.62 Recall Mechanix Hall, Worcester, MA).
Trilling emphasized the tension between the "model kingdom of one's reading, and the mental climate in which one happens to grow up" (One of my postdoctoral teachers, Larry Lipking, had assisted for Trilling, and recounted with amusement how alumni returning to Princeton would brag, once Trilling became famous, that they had taken Trilling's course. But Lipking had taken attendance, and knew they'd seldom shown up. Their attendance greatly improved in their memory, once they aged and Trilling offered bragging rights.)
Levin notes how little American lit was read early on: TS Eliot, for example, "grew up on the banks of the Mississippi, so to speak, but didn't read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn until late in life"(64). Matthieson, as an Asst Prof in 1930, initiated the first Harvard course to move beyond the New England orbit taught prior. His course, "Writers of the South and West": Whitman (NYC) and Melville (W MA)!
One might say, not very south, nor very west. But consider, I live in Westport, Massachusetts, near the Westport River. What are we west of? Cape Cod, a little.
Levin's book is a great survey of the humanities in historical perspective, how Seneca first distinguished "artes liberales," the studies of a landowner who need not learn skills for work, from "artes mechanicae." Seneca said the liberal arts offered no mercenary reward, so they were "worthy of free men, and indeed were agents of liberation"(26).
Rhetoric in the 13C took on the expedient, practical use as letter-writing (ars dictaminis), so that
the U of Paris had become a business school, according to Henri d'Adeli. The classics had retreated to the U of Orleans. In America, James Russell Lowell said the university should teach nothing useful, while Herbert Spencer disagreed, said then the child learning Latin becomes "Just like the Orinoco Indian paints and tatoos himself."
The humanist ideal, the cortegiano or the honnete homme, equally adept at arms and letters, "whom Don Quixote strove to emulate"(32). Don Quixote, the "roman de les romans" (Thibaudet) but also "le roman contre les romans." (See "The Quixotic Principle" in this book, pp229ff.) Levin, "Don Quixote, in its intention and impact, constituted an overt act of criticism"(79). Cervantes was one of Melville's demigods, and Faulkner reread Don Quixote every year"(238). Pascal said "Le vrai eloquence se moque de l'éloquence"(241), which Levin adapts to the true novel which mocks the novel.
"English Studies were the poor mans classics, as D.J.Palmer has shown...and they got their start in dissenting academies and mechanics' institutes." (p.62 Recall Mechanix Hall, Worcester, MA).
Trilling emphasized the tension between the "model kingdom of one's reading, and the mental climate in which one happens to grow up" (One of my postdoctoral teachers, Larry Lipking, had assisted for Trilling, and recounted with amusement how alumni returning to Princeton would brag, once Trilling became famous, that they had taken Trilling's course. But Lipking had taken attendance, and knew they'd seldom shown up. Their attendance greatly improved in their memory, once they aged and Trilling offered bragging rights.)
Levin notes how little American lit was read early on: TS Eliot, for example, "grew up on the banks of the Mississippi, so to speak, but didn't read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn until late in life"(64). Matthieson, as an Asst Prof in 1930, initiated the first Harvard course to move beyond the New England orbit taught prior. His course, "Writers of the South and West": Whitman (NYC) and Melville (W MA)!
One might say, not very south, nor very west. But consider, I live in Westport, Massachusetts, near the Westport River. What are we west of? Cape Cod, a little.
Displaying 1 of 1 review