Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education, and the Arts

Written over the past 15 years, this gathering of retired Boston University professor Shattuck's essays and reviews begins with a vociferous section on the education wars, leveling shots at cultural relativism and the politicization of education. In 1994, at the founding session of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, of which Shattuck was later president, the author read ""Nineteen Theses on Literature,"" which distilled his beliefs in a traditional academic approach based on a faith in authors and their works. The theses are reproduced here, along with critiques of other books on education, as well as musings on reading, teaching, language and thought. Shattuck's tone is sometimes polemical, but the essays that follow are his own best defense. In pieces on Manet, impressionism, futurism, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp (""the court jester of modernism""), he demonstrates the keen insight and fluid prose produced by a deep and broad education, strongly focused (on early 20th-century French culture) and sophisticated, yet open to unexpected correspondences and plainspoken analysis. His affinity for figures like Mallarm , who was both a dutiful citizen and a revolutionary poet, is a reminder that, despite some conservative views on education, Shattuck has always been a champion of the new and experimental in art. From The Banquet Years (1955) to the NBA-winning Marcel Proust (1974) to Forbidden Knowledge (1996), he has blazed his own intellectual trail, and readers will welcome this latest foray into the groves of art and academe. (Sept.)