Background
Clausen, Christopher John was born on May 14, 1942 in Richmond, Virginia, United States. Son of John Adam and Suzanne Anna (Ravage) Clausen.
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book
The Moral Imagination: Essays on Literature and Ethics
(Book by Clausen, Christopher)
Book by Clausen, Christopher
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0877451516/?tag=2022091-20
The Place of Poetry: Two Centuries of an Art in Crisis
(Since the end of the eighteenth century, Christopher Clau...)
Since the end of the eighteenth century, Christopher Clausen asserts, poetry has steadily declined in cultural status in the English-speaking world, yielding its former place as a bearer of truth to the advancing sciences. As the position of poetry was more and more threatened, its defenders made ever higher claims for its importance, even maintaining for a time that it would take the place of religion. But, though the Romantics brought about a sustained revival of serious poetry for a broad audience, the audience began to dwindle toward the end of the nineteenth century, and the decline accelerated as the twentieth century advanced. Though some of the cultural changes responsible for this retreat were beyond the control of poets―"a society in which many people find their chief security and sense of meaning through the possession of certain objects will produce great advertising, not great poetry"―Clausen finds in this situation evidence of an abdication among artists. Because modernist poets and their successors abandoned some indispensable principles, he believes, serious contemporary poetry now has virtually no audience outside of English departments. Yet the need for poetry "is not less in an era like ours," and "the opportunities that the end of the twentieth century offers to poetry will not become fully apparent unless and until poets take advantage of them."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813151708/?tag=2022091-20
My Life with President Kennedy
( As its title implies, this book reflects in varying way...)
As its title implies, this book reflects in varying ways the experiences and attitudes of one who came of age in the first half of that now mythical decade, the 1960s. In an unusual combination of history, criticism, and autobiography, one of our best literary and cultural critics explores life and death in the late twentieth century and some of the older worlds that made American culture what it is today. Sixties survivors, as Christopher Clausen points out, do not necessarily hold more beliefs or tastes in common than any other group. Nevertheless they may be more likely than most people born earlier or later to consider the relations between public and private life—the political and the personal—a problem, sometimes even an unresolvable problem. While this is not primarily a book about the 1960s, most of it occupies the noisy crossroads where public worlds intersect the private, mysterious lives of individuals and families, where ordinary people pursue their own destinies and desires while submitting consciously or unconsciously to the pressures of the public sphere—a set of demands or aspirations common to people in a particular time and place. In modern America, where most of these essays are set, any individual is likely to live in several worlds at any given moment, as well as to pass through several more over a lifetime. Because of rapid transitions in public life and culture while they were still at an impressionable age, members of the “Kennedy generation” became almost morbidly conscious of the persistence of the past in the present. The often unpredictable effect on individual lives of historical forces is the main subject of Clausen's fascinating account.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/087745485X/?tag=2022091-20
Christopher John Clausen
Edit Profileliterary critic English language educator
Education
Bachelor, Earlham College, 1964; Master of Arts, University of Chicago, 1965; Doctor of Philosophy, Queen's U., 1972.
Career
Instructor, U. Hawaii, Honolulu, 1965-1966; assistant professor, Concord College, Athens, West Virginia, 1966-1968; assistant professor, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, 1973-1979; associate professor, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, 1979-1984; professor, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, 1984-1985; professor, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, since 1985. Head department English, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, 1985-1990. ColumnistThe New Leader, New York City, since 1994.
Achievements
Works
book
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The Place of Poetry: Two Centuries of an Art in Crisis
(Since the end of the eighteenth century, Christopher Clau...)
-
My Life with President Kennedy
( As its title implies, this book reflects in varying way...)
-
The Moral Imagination: Essays on Literature and Ethics
(Book by Clausen, Christopher)
-
The Place of Poetry: Two Centuries of an Art in Crisis
Membership
Member American Association University professors, National Association Scholars, Association Literary Scholars and Critics.
Connections
Married Nancy Tunstall Palmer, August 3, 1976.
