Word: kazin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Like all anthologies, Contemporaries has its ups and downs; even allowing for this inherent defect of the form however, this collection of Alfred Kazin's literary and social criticism of the last ten years or so is not as good as it should be. One judges Mr. Kazin by his own high standards: his first, best book On Native Grounds, a study of American literature from then to now, is one of the finest brief surveys of the field, comprehensive yet insightful, carefully thought-out but delightfully without a theory to hawk, Kazin has traveled far on the reputation this...
...thing, Mr. Kazin ought to find himself a new editor--if he has an old editor. This collection appears to have been put together directly from the magazines and reviews in which the pieces first appeared. A particularly annoying, if minor evidence of this is the repetition in one essay after another of the same brief quotations and marginal illustrative remarks. Thus, for example, Kazin complains no less than three times in three consecutive essays about Kinsey's statistical approach to American sexual experience; he refers to Emerson's famous lecture series on capital-C "Culture" to make the same...
...stuff inside is Kazin's, of course; and a lot of the editing it needs should have been done at Kazin's desk. Far too many of these pieces read like first drafts; they contain only preliminary thought, the superstructure of an essay, which should largely disappear from the finished product. One comes upon the final few sentences of an essay with something of a shock: "What? That...
...tales which are the primary sources of Yiddish literature. Yet, Singer's conviction that the demons he writes about are real is balanced in his fiction by a wholly modern psychological skepticism. He has been condemned by many Yiddish critics for the same qualities that critics like Rexroth, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe find praiseworthy--a lack of concern for the fate of the Jews as a nation, a wholly Western concern for the individual, the unique...
Readers compliment him on articles, but seldom argue with him, Kazin admits, solemnly regretting the middle-brow docility of his congregation. In the course of letting some of the air out of Drama Critic Kenneth Tynan, Kazin discovers a maxim he himself would do well to follow. The British writer's rule, he reports, is "rouse tempers, goad, lacerate, raise whirlwinds." Kazin does none of these things as he dolefully doles out justice...