Background
Goodheart, Eugene was born on June 26, 1931 in Brooklyn. Son of Samuel and Miriam Goodheart.
( Eugene Goodheart's remarkably compact and penetrating a...)
Eugene Goodheart's remarkably compact and penetrating analysis examines the skeptic disposition that has informed advanced literary discourse over the past generation. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691066264/?tag=2022091-20
( Debates on culture, politics, and the university have ...)
Debates on culture, politics, and the university have hardly abated since the 1960s when the radical assault on the authority of culture first challenged the classical conception of higher education with imperious demands for relevance and ideological correctness. Since then, campus unrest on the part of students has given way to a radicalized faculty characterized by contempt for high culture, fetishization of pop culture, and increasing absorption by feminism and identity politics. While this development has not gone unchallenged, most have dismissed opponents of traditional scholarship as intellectual nihilists and anarchists. In contrast, Eugene Goodheart's Culture and the Radical Conscience recognizes the moral and cultural roots of radical and utopian tradition while deploring its tendency toward intolerance and narrowness. Goodheart defends the study of serious literature for its interplay of aesthetic response, alertness to political theme, and historical awareness.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765807378/?tag=2022091-20
( An important debate in modern literary criticism conce...)
An important debate in modern literary criticism concerns the exact relationship between the ancient epic and the novel. Both the epic and the most ambitious modern novels are large-scale attempts to present a comprehensive view of the world through the experience of a representative hero. However, in the older tradition the hero stood for the aspirations and highest ideals of his society. The protagonist of the modern novel is usually at odds with that society, whether as exile, active rebel, or antagonistic critic. In Novel Practices, the distinguished literary scholar Eugene Goodheart surveys a representative selection of modern novelists tracing how the epic impulse has been reshaped under the conditions of modernity. Goodheart describes how George Eliot and James Joyce's comprehensive artistic creation enabled them to demonstrate a mastery of the world unattainable to their thwarted, flawed, or feckless heroes and heroines. Works such as Middlemarch and Ulysses, encyclopedic in their inclusiveness, share an ambitious scope that is virtually synonymous with epic. Goodheart shows that even in shorter works, such as James's The Beast in the Jungle and Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, the standard of the epic hero acts as an ironic subtext. A chapter on Thomas Mann provides a European perspective, enacting conflict between self and society through a dramatized contest of ideas. Goodheart explores ambiguities of point of view as characteristic of modern uncertainty: how much authority or reliability should the reader concede to the narrator? What is the relationship between the narrator and the author? These and related questions are addressed in chapters on Lawrence, James, Bellow, Woolf, and Roth, which also deal with the place of literary biography in understanding fiction. Goodheart's approach centers on fiction, and although he takes cognizance of the critical theory of the past several decades, he nevertheless emphasizes the centrality of the author and authorial intention. Novel Practices will be essential reading for students of literature, culture, and intellectual history.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765802082/?tag=2022091-20
( In recent decades the humanities have been in thrall to...)
In recent decades the humanities have been in thrall to postmodern skepticism, while Darwinists, brimming with confidence in the genuine progress they have made in the sciences of biology and psychology, have set their sights on rescuing the humanities from the ravages of postmodernism. In this volume, Eugene Goodheart attacks the neo-Darwinist approach to the arts and articulates a powerful defense of humanist criticism. E. O. Wilson, the distinguished Harvard biologist, has spoken of converting philosophy into science, substituting science for religion, and formulating a biological theory of literature and the arts in Consilence: The Unity of Knowledge. Goodheart demonstrates that Wilson's efforts, and those of his colleagues Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett among others, have resulted in scientism rather than science. If, for example, Dawkins had contented himself in The Selfish Gene with the claim that Darwinism had made worthless other answers to the question of how we have evolved, he would have given offense only to creationists, but questions of meaning and purpose are of another order. Contemporary Darwinist critiques err in assuming that art and traditional criticism aspire to truths that can be codified in terms of scientific laws. If this were so, we would have to regard the speculations of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Rousseau as worthless. Goodheart exposes the philistinism of literary Darwinism, the bad faith and inverted fundamentalism of the Darwinian approach to religion, and the dangers of the eff ort to create a Darwinian ethical system. Taken together, Goodheart's arguments show that in moving beyond their area of competence, the neo -Darwinists commit an ideology, not a science.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1412811473/?tag=2022091-20
( Goethe once remarked that "every emancipation of the s...)
Goethe once remarked that "every emancipation of the spirit is pernicious unless there is a corresponding growth of control." This remark may be taken as a motto for Eugene Goodheart's study of an aspect of the cultural history of the past two hundred years. In separate chapters on Rousseau, Stendhal, Goethe and Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Whitman, Lawrence, and Joyce, Goodheart discovers a community of concern which he calls the cult of the ego. All these writers examined here in one way or another deal with "the emancipation of the spirit" with all its promise and danger. The characteristic attempt is to "extend the boundaries of the self by going beyond the area of safety" and. thereby risking even the destruction of the self. They advance the claims of the self at the same time seeking the controls that will secure these claims. The artist-hero becomes the central figure in Goodheart's volume, since it is he who comes to exemplify the possibilities of the cult of the ego. Their efforts, Goodheart argues, have ambiguous results. The seeds of contemporary nihilism are in the failures of these writers to master the chaos of egoism, which they helped engender. But their heroism was partly in the effort of resistance: moral, religious, aesthetic. In a large portion of modern literature, resistance has been abandoned either out of exhaustion or out of fascination with the destructive tendency of modern life: in Beckett's phrase, "a world endlessly collapsing." In his introduction to this first paperback edition, Goodheart discusses the book's origin in relation to the counter-cultural unrest of 1968 when it was first published and weighs its theme of the emancipated self against current postmodern assertions of the "death of the author." The Cult of the Ego is written with admirable clarity and economy. Its interests are literary, moral and political. Moving freely and knowledgeably among various national literatures, Goodheart has made an original and valuable contribution to the field of comparative literature. Eugene Goodheart is Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Brandeis University. Among his books are Novel Practices: Classic Modern Fiction, Modernism and the Critical Spirit, Culture and the Radical Conscience, and Confessions of a Secular Jew: A Memoir, all available from Transaction.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226302865/?tag=2022091-20
( Eugene Goodheart's remarkably compact and penetrating a...)
Eugene Goodheart's remarkably compact and penetrating analysis examines the skeptic disposition that has informed advanced literary discourse over the past generation. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691611904/?tag=2022091-20
(An assessment of the current state and future of literary...)
An assessment of the current state and future of literary studies in the United States, this text challenges the view that literary classics must be relevant to our immediate concerns. It also addresses the question of objectivity in humanistic study.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299166546/?tag=2022091-20
("Criticism, as I understand and practice it, is evaluativ...)
"Criticism, as I understand and practice it, is evaluative as well as interpretive," writes Eugene Goodheart. Pieces of Resistance is a collection of Goodheart's essays and reviews written between 1960 and 1985. The book responds to the political, cultural, and literary changes expressed during this period by novelists, critics, and journalists. Goodheart's exemplary figures include Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, and V.S. Naipaul: writers he believes share a particular sensitivity to literary and cultural ideologies that distort and diminish our understanding of the world. Goodheart's book is divided into three parts. The first section discusses critics Trilling, Rahv, Leslie Fiedler, Geoffrey Hartman, David Bleich, and Susan Sontag--to name a few. The second part devotes itself to contemporary culture and includes essays on journals such as The New York Review of Books, Commentary, and The Evergreen Review, which in the 1960s and early 1970s provided a well-lit playground for various political, cultural, and literary themes. Finally, Goodheart examines the work of many modern writers with essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer, Daniel Fuchs, Ralph Ellison, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, Bernard Malamud, William Styron, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, and Saul Bellow. Goodheart does not pretend to impersonal objectivity; his commitment to evaluative criticism--seeing a text in its relationship to political and cultural movements--is a deliberate response to current, increasingly specialized forms of criticism.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521020182/?tag=2022091-20
( What it means to be a Jew lies at the very heart of Co...)
What it means to be a Jew lies at the very heart of Confessions of a Secular Jew, a provocative memoir and a thoughtful speculation on the nature of Jewish identity and experience in an increasingly secular world. The legacy bequeathed to Eugene Goodheart was a "progressive" secular Yiddish education which identified Jewish struggles against oppression with working class struggles against exploitation. In the vanguard was the Soviet Union. Goodheart's heroes were Moses, Bar Kochbah, Judah Maccabee, Karl Marx and that strange honorary Jew, Joseph Stalin, whose anti-Semitism would later become known to the world. Confessions of a Secular Jew is the story of Goodheart's disillusionment with the naive, even false, progressivism of that education. At the same time, it is an attempt to rescue and come to grips with the positive remains of that education and heritage. In the introduction to the new Transaction edition of his memoir, Goodheart addresses the themes of social justice, Zionism, chosenness, messianism, and alienation from a secular Jewish perspective. The memoir takes the reader from Goodheart's coming of age in Brooklyn to his higher education at Columbia College in the early fifties and beyond to his varied career as university teacher and literary critic. The memoir provides memorable characterizations of writers whom he knew, among them Lionel Trilling (his teacher), Saul Bellow, Richard Wright (whom he met in Paris), Hannah Arendt, and Philip Rahv.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765805995/?tag=2022091-20
Goodheart, Eugene was born on June 26, 1931 in Brooklyn. Son of Samuel and Miriam Goodheart.
Bachelor, Columbia University, 1953. Doctor of Philosophy in English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 1961. Master of Arts in English, University Virginia, 1954.
Postgraduate (Fulbright fellow), Sorbonne, University Paris, 1957.
From instructor to assistant professor English Bard College, 1958-1962. Assistant professor University Chicago, 1962-1966. Associate professor Mount Holyoke College, 1966-1967.
From associate professor to professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1967-1974. Professor, chairman department English Boston University, 1974-1983. Edytha Macy Gross professor emeritus humanities Brandeis University, 1983—2001, emeritus, since 2001.
Visiting professor Wesleyan University Summer School, 1963-1964, 66, 69, Columbia University. Gauss seminarist Princeton University, 1972.
( In recent decades the humanities have been in thrall to...)
(This treatise engages in a discourse with both academic a...)
( Debates on culture, politics, and the university have ...)
( What it means to be a Jew lies at the very heart of Co...)
(An assessment of the current state and future of literary...)
( Eugene Goodheart's remarkably compact and penetrating a...)
( Eugene Goodheart's remarkably compact and penetrating a...)
(In The Reign of Ideology Goodheart presents a powerful, t...)
( Goethe once remarked that "every emancipation of the s...)
( An important debate in modern literary criticism conce...)
("Criticism, as I understand and practice it, is evaluativ...)
("A highly cogent, powerfully reasoned statement in defens...)
(Book by Goodheart, Eugene)
( -- Morris Dickstein )
Member Modern Language Association, Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association.
Married Patricia Somer, August 13, 1960 (divorced July 1973). Children: Eric, Jessica. Married Joan Bamberger, July 8, 1977.