When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My Teachers Fadiman, Barzun, Trilling (Personal Takes)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.86 (877 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0812236327 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 168 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-03-16 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.. That none of them believed that women were capable of living this life might seem to disqualify them as useful models for an ambitious young female graduate student, but Heilbrun maintains that their basic misogyny saved her from too slavish imitation. Two of the three were, like Heilbrun, Jews, at a time when her alma mater, Columbia University, viewed Jews with some alarm. To a younger generation, all three of Heilbrun's mentors Jacques Barzun, Clifton Fadiman and Lionel Trilling might need identification, though they once loomed over the American literary and academic scene. Their example showed the young Heilbrun how a public life of the mind might be lived. Ne
Theirs was the universe in which I wished to have my being."With these words, Carolyn Heilbrun begins a personal, pointed, and surprisingly moving account of how a woman, destined to become one of the leading feminist critics of her day as well as one of our most popular mystery novelists, found the models for the life she aspired to in men who neither imagined nor countenanced women as their equals or colleagues. Later, in her days as a graduate student at Columbia, it was Trilling who would have the most powerful intellectual effect upon her, formulating as he did the tensions inherent in the desire to salvage what was of worth from a sad, almost moribund culture, even if he frankly admitted to no interest in teaching women or in considering their destinies beyond the domestic sphere. Only the courtly Barzun, also a mentor at Columbia, seemed capable of respecting female accomplishment and eschewing stereotyped views of women. Yet together, all three men unconsciously made Heilbrun's life as a feminist possible, by representing both what she wished to join and what she needed to struggle against.When Men Were the Only Models We Had is a loving, admiring, but stringent account of youthful enthusiasms, of the romance of ideas, of the intellectual brilliance of three unwitting mentors, and of the hopelessness of female ambition in the years before the feminist movement of the last three decades of the last century. Although one of them never knew of my
tragedy is what most marks us if we are thinkers S. Lee Since I took a graduate seminar course in women's memoirs in American literature, I have read several books by Heilbrun. As I was not going to specialize in autobiography/memoirs or in feminist theory, I read her more as a writer than a scholar or theorist, focusing more on how she says things than on what. In this regard, I enjoyed every book I read because her language was something unique. It is clear and concise, without being simple, authoratitive without being pedantic, seemingly aloof . Fascinating book by prominent Columbia English Prof. of Victorian literature & biographer of Gloria Steinem This is an important book about both literary scholarship and education in America by a prominent scholar who was also a feminist and wrote literary mysteries, under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross.