Free World

Biographies & Memoirs

Louis Menand

Arts & Literature

Fourth Estate

A riveting, original book about the creation of the modern American mind. The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., founder of modern jurisprudence; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea - an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James, and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things "out there" waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent - like knives and forks and microchips - to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals - that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent - like germs - on their human carriers and environment. And they thought that the survival of any idea depends not on its immutability but on its adaptability. `The Metaphysical Club' is written in the spirit of this idea about ideas. It is not a history of philosophy but an absorbing narrative about personalities and social history, a story about America. It begins with the American Civil War and ends with World War I. This is a book about the evolution of the American mind during the crucial period that formed the world we now inhabit.

The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

History

Harpercollins Pb

A study of a literary success, and the forces that combine to create a successful literary movement, Discovering Modernism places T.S. Eliot in his cultural context to discover why his poetry and criticism answered the needs of a particular moment. Menand's analysis, which includes a reevaluation of the influence of Eliot's doctoral dissertation if philosophy on his later work, yields fresh readings of some familiar features of Elito's style--the use of literary allusion, the valorization of "tradition," the critical formulae of the objective corrolative and the dissociation of sensibility, and the notes to The Waste Land. But this book is about more than T.S. Eliot. Because Menands's larger subject is the crisis in literature that produced Eliot and the entire Modernist movement, he examines the ways in which the literary values of the 19th century became problems for their 20th century counterparts. With its duscussion of such topics as Conrad and the rise of professionalism, Darwinism and the late 19th century notion of style, Tennyson's posthumous reputation, and Pater and the Imagists, its strenghtens our knowledge of the ties that bound Modernism to the 19th century, and sheds new light on how writers go about "making it new."

Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Oxford University Press

The Future of Academic Freedom

At the bottom of every controversy embroiling the university today—from debates over hate-speech codes to the reorganization of the academy as a multicultural institution—is the concept of academic freedom. But academic freedom is almost never mentioned in these debates. Now nine leading academics, including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Edward Said, Richard Rorty, and Joan W. Scott, consider the problems confronting the American University in terms of their effect on the future of academic freedom. "Louis Menand has assembled The Future of Academic Freedom to better define and delineate what should and should not happen within our colleges and universities. . . . The whole extremely learned yet accessible debate exploits the freedoms it extols, tackling sensitive subjects such as ethnicity and ethics head-on."—Publishers Weekly "The essays are not only sharp, elegant and lucid, but extremely well-informed about the history of American battles over academic freedom."—Alan Ryan, Times Higher Education Supplement "[A] superb inquiry into some of the most vexing and significant issues in higher education today."—Zachary Karabell, Boston Book Review

Education & Teaching

Higher & Continuing Education

University of Chicago Press

The Metaphysical Club

Americas

FSG.

A riveting, original book about the creation of modern American thought.

Metaphysical Club

The Metaphysical Club (Chinese Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Shanghai Translation Publishing House

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Books by Louis Menand