Word: westing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Reader contains a wide variety of selections from West's oeuvre, with everything from a short story to television interviews to commentrary on race, politics, literature, music and sexuality. It is a book about self-discovery, and West's efforts to come to terms with himself and the world he lives in. This lofty aim is often undercut by what can be interpreted as grandiose, self serving comments, but one would find it hard to fault West or the book for his unceasing vigilance in attempting to understand himself and his surroundings. What one finds in the Reader...
...example of what draws criticism is the way in which West writes a short introduction to each excerpt in the Reader. While these introductions often help to shed light on the issue at hand or provide necessary background information, they just as often appear to be needlessly pompous. For example, West's introductions include many phrases such as "it is one of the most requested essays in my corpus." This style leaves him open to critical attacks, and West's views will always render him unpopular with some. He responds that "I do not write or act to win popularity...
...While one can question the substance of West, one cannot help but be impressed by the volume of his work. Twenty books by West since 1982 are listed in the front of the Reader. His future projects are no less ambitious: West plans a collaboration on African-American and Greek literature with Elemi Mavromatidou along with a long term project on Checkov and Coltrane and more ventuers into literary criticism. His next published works will be Heart of American Darkness, and I Ain't Noways Tired, a "bold venture in intellectual biography modeled on black musical forms...
...West himself addresses some of the criticisms of his work and his own misgivings, writing that "I have great suspicion of autobiographical writing. So much of it reeks of self-indulgence and self-absorption, yet any serious engagement with the world includes a questioning of one's self." But he firmly answers the question by stating that "A wholesale critical inventory of ourselves and our communities of struggle is neither self-indulgent autobiography nor self-righteous reminisence...
...David Horowitz's "Cornel West: No Light in his Attic" appeared in the Oct. 11, 1999 issue of online magazine Salon (reprinted in the Harvard Salient earlier this fall). In the article, Horowitz lambasts West for what Horowitz sees as his intellectual emptiness and pretension: "While his writings combine the philosophically grandiose with postmodern frou frou, they are singularly lacking in the intellectual power that would sustain either." Horowitz moves from a questionable attack on West's intellect to a ludicrous charge of racism and anti-Semitism. He strikes at the very root of the Reader by ridiculing West...