Louis Menand
Louis Menand
Louis Menandis an American critic and essayist, best known for his book The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America...
figured hard
He's got everything all figured out. It was hard to get him off track.
met particular toward warmth
When I met him, I didn't feel a particular warmth toward him.
strong thinking trying
I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular.
college views body
My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.
criticism literature want
One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but one of the functions of that is basically the sort of Consumer Reports function of letting readers know whether this is something they want to read.
teacher teaching reading
When I was young, I went to college, had a teacher who was, had been a student of Trilling's at Columbia, this was in California. And he, I started reading him around that time, and then I went to Columbia as well, Trilling was still teaching there, I took a course with him. He was not a great teacher, but he was, when I was younger, he was a good model for the kind of criticism I wanted to do, because he thought very dialectically.
reader hard ifs
It's very hard to know who your readers are, but that's who I'm... if I have somebody in my head, that's probably who it is.
decision needs way
The way universities operate is the decision about what students need for the degree are... is the decision made by the faculty.
thinking students kind
Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.
students courses
You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.
fun thinking fields
I think in general there's no point in going into a field like English literature if you're not going to have fun with it.
thinking discipline curriculum
The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.
years careers ideas
Getting faculties to come to a consensus about something that they've never really thought about or had to worry about in their careers before can be a rather slow process and a long process, it certainly was the case at Harvard, and it's the case with most of the general education curricula that I know of, it takes four or five years just to get everybody on board with one idea.
writing people intellectual
I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me.