Word: delbancos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...DELBANCO IS a learned and lively storyteller, revealing Channing's hopes and fears about his personal life, nature, history, language, slavery, and romanticism. These topics provide the framework for his book. The author's analysis of Channing and the slavery issue is the most provocative. He focuses on Channing's well-known 1842 document. The Duty of the Free States, and encourages us to read it "as one among those mid-century expressions of alarm, even despair, at the unsatisfying choice that America now offered between a cheapened communitarian ideal and the grandiose self." Channing, a man who had believed...
Channing could only glimpse the Keatsian stars and the Thoreauvian mornings. While he looked inward in an age that insisted the truth was outside the self. Channing advanced, Delbanco reminds us, toward the Transcendentalist belief in the internalized, of the divine without reaching it. The author's compelling analysis claims that Channing "is willing to seek truth in the mental process itself." He "discredits" history, "dismantles" nature, and assails the law as he comes closer to understanding his own human head. Delbanco affirms "he has affinities with Emerson, with William James. But he has no school." In an age when...
...Delbanco describes Channing and the intellectual life of nineteenth century America in academic prose that is alternately stiff and playful, making for some confusion but not obfuscating his larger interpretations. In seeking brevity, the author looks for neatly suggestive anecdotes and historical shorthands to portray his subject, and occasionally descends to awkward constructions, calling Trumball's M'Fingal a "bundle of hesitations," and stretching to describe Channing as fighting "an internal civil war that would last as long as he lived." There are also times when it seems the author reveres his subject almost unceasingly, remarking early in the biography...
Nevertheless, Delbanco deems Channing's awareness of the "pace of social change" occasionally "acute" but more often "naive," and admits: "Without a critic's coercion, no man is a true bellwether for a century, and Channing may not always place his hand consciously on the pulse of his age." When Channing fails as an emblem of his generation. Delbanco shifts to a discussion of America in the nineteenth century, and with thoughtfulness and clarity, connects the dilemmas of this period to those of the twentieth century. When the author declares that "America has become a collection of self-interested combattants...
...hope and reason which is called liberalism." William Ellery Channing also retained this balance, at a time when it was most delicate. He promoted the idea of a national literature, sought an American Milton enthusiastically while quietly harboring fears and doubts that America could produce one. The beauty of Delbanco's essay resides in its expansiveness: it opens outward from Channing's life to ask larger questions, and leaves the reader something to ponder. Comparing Channing to Henry Adams, the author illuminates a man who "asked the overwhelming question of his century and ours: whether the world is spinning into...