Word: culler
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Reading the names in the table of contents could convince a reader that what's happened in literature in the past century has happened here. The truth is that the famous who stream in and out of Cambridge seldom grew to greatness here, but Cullers' introduction is dedicated to the other proposition. Again, he's writing for the chauvinists, who will also be amused by the inside story of the Advocate's self-definition. The magazine that was conceived as a college newspaper and published polemics on compulsory chapel, college cheers, and Walt Whitman (all re-printed here) has also...
...would bet on the last. This anthology is one long, heavy, awkwardly put-together Curiosity. Admittedly, reading the lyrics of young T.S. Eliot '10--already slightly bored, effete, with allusions to classical figures and scenes--is a "critic's delight," as Culler claims. The careful reader will find parallels with "Prufrock" in "Spleen," written when Eliot...
...Culler is too often guilty of simply showing off the great names, when the pieces written by these men would probably embarrass them today. Leonard Bernstein '39 wrote music columns for the Advocate, so Culler has included one of them in which Bernstein knocked Columbia Records; he was given to college boy chattiness, concluding paragraphs with phrases like "end of tirade" or "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. contributed political analyses, so a piece predicting a Republican comeback in 1940 has been re-printed. Presumably, the reader is supposed to be delighted with this gentle irony, amused by a posterior...
...post-Hiroshima anthology selections written by students are mostly imitations of these people. Culler, in his introduction, makes much of the polished, professional techniques of these contemporary writers; they are professional, I guess, because they don't use much punctuation and their characters have unreal names like Cherub and Pixie...
...Culler's introduction hints that the anthology is a Curiosity, published for the intimate Harvard family. Most people wouldn't buy it if just any Joe were writing about "football at other colleges," but it's Theodore Roosevelt sizing up the Ivy League. Therefore, the book, a real cocktail party conversation piece, will end up on innumerable coffee tables. But it should be kept within the family. The outside world should never find out that Harvard College didn't teach its distinguished graduates everything they know. The Advocate Centennial Anthology ought only to be sold sub rosa during Commencement Week...