Literature and the Sixth Sense by Philip Rahv 1970 Sentry Edition

Description: Literature and the Sixth Sense by Philip Rahv AUTHORIllustrated by NAME Published by Houghton Miffin Company Boston1970 Sentry Edition Format: PaperbackCategory: NonfictionGenre: Literary CriticismTopic: Modern American and European Literature in the 60s Book Condition We take great care to provide as much detail as possible about our books, so you can make the decision that's right for you. We take photos from every angle and try to get photos of all damage or flaws. If there's an angle or page you'd like to see or you have a question about the book, please message us! We respond to all messages as quickly as possible! Condition: Acceptable Description: This book is in good condition for its age, but the binding is cracked in places causing the book to fall open between certain pages (see pics). The front cover is a little worn and also has a couple bends near the spine. Book Cover: Worn on edges, creased on front Spine: Creased Binding: Broken in places causing the book to fall open in certain spots, doesn't affect readability Page Edges: Fair Pages: 445 Marks: None Description of Book: Includes essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne (Scarlet letter), Henry Miller, Henry James, Arthur Koestler, Leo Tolstoy, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Herman Melville, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, and others. Literature and the Sixth Sense is Philip Rahv’s selection from thirty years of his literary criticism. He has included much material from the earlier books, Image and Idea and The Myth and the Powerhouse, as well as a dozen or so pieces not hitherto collected, but has omitted several essays on Dostoevsky’s novels, which are planned as chapters in a future book, and essays dealing directly with politics. Some titles have been changed; two or three updating postscripts have been added; otherwise few changes have been made in the material. The pieces are arranged chronologically in two sections, one for longer and generally synoptic essays, the other for shorter reviews. The reviews come last but they do not let the book down. Rahv is one of the few living critics whose reviews are collectible. “Collection,” however, is a misleading term for a book that is as much a coherent whole as Arnold’s Essays in Criticism or T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays. Rahv indicates in his Foreword that the prime integrating source upon which he has drawn is that historical insight which Nietzsche identifies as “virtually a new faculty of the mind, a sixth sense . . . [that] functions both as an analytic instrument and as a new bracing resource of the modern sensibility.” It is the sixth sense in Rahv that has made him, to use the distinction he develops in “Criticism and the Imagination of Alternatives” (1956), a prospective rather than retrospective critic: one who “conceives of literature as something actual and alive in his own time and relates himself to it by trying to affect its course of development here and now.” It is the lack of this sense in our age, he points out in a 1950 essay, that is in large part responsible for the “abrupt swings in consciousness from one demoralizing extreme to another.” Listen and Subscribe to the Commentary Podcast_____________ Those abrupt swings in consciousness have produced the various kinds of excess against which Rahv has done battle over this thirty-year span: in the socially-oriented 30’s, the excess that stuffed “the creativity of the Left into the sack of political orthodoxy”; in the 40’s and 50’s, the excess of the traditional-formalist New Critics and of the myth- and symbol-mongers; in the “swinging” 60’s, the excesses of the mind- and consciousness-fearing neo-romantics who have confused manic verbalization with excellence of style and who are bemused with the prospect of salvation through sex. To put it another way, Rahv’s sixth sense has functioned since the mid-30’s as a distant early warning system against the false promises of ideology—ideology understood as a natural enemy of historical insight. He has had the good fortune of discovering early in life that the ideologue’s inevitable impulse in the presence of literature is to use it in the service of a “higher” cause. His early efforts as a Partisan Review editor to resist this impulse are well known. In effect, however, he has never stopped resisting it, for what he has objected to in the traditionalists, the mythomaniacs, the religionists, the formalists, the amateur Freudians, the vulgar Marxists, the sociologizers, and the swingers is the attempt to reduce literature by making it subservient to the needs of some cult, piety, or orthodoxy. Observing in “Religion and the Intellectuals” how many gifted writers are “plunging from one debauch of ideology into another without giving themselves time to sober up,” he recommends “a dose of skepticism so strong as to make them stand fast against the solicitations of ideologies.” This was written in 1950, but as Rahv views the ensuing years he finds little reason to alter the prescription. At times, it seems to me now, it has been stronger than the symptoms warranted (as administered against the New Critics and the myth critics, for instance); nevertheless, it has been prescribed for the right ailments and at the right time. The sixth sense in Rahv has made him especially sensitive to the dichotomy between experience and consciousness in American writing. The opening essay, the familiar “Paleface and Redskin” (1939), functions like a prelude, the interrelated themes of which sound throughout the book. “The Cult of Experience in American Writing” (1940), “The Dark Lady of Salem” (1941), “The Heiress of All the Ages” (1943), and “The Native Bias” (1957) are concerned with this dichotomy in a major way, but it is an important factor also in Rahv’s assessment of such writers as Hemingway, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Arthur Miller, Leslie Fiedler, Allen Ginsberg, and Norman Mailer. One of Rahv’s great services to American literature is that he helps us to see why Mailer’s neo-primitivist “yea-saying to experience” in his recent fiction is no less crippling to the writer than Hawthorne’s isolation from experience. James, who “learned how to nourish his gifts and grew to full maturity,” was not so crippled, nor is Saul Bellow, “the most intelligent novelist of his generation” as well as “the most consistently interesting in point of growth and development.” _____________ A book of this kind, ranging as it does over a period in our cultural life so marked by change at all levels, could be a useful record even if its insights and judgments were no longer especially relevant. Rahv himself accedes to this record-value in his decision to reprint his essays without substantial changes, and so delivers himself to the whimsies of the Zeitgeist. But what continually struck me as I reread pieces I had not read for years was how well they stand up despite the fact that they carry the imprint of their particular times and occasions. This is especially true of the spendid synoptic essays on Hawthorne (1941), Henry James’s heroines (1943), and the introductions to the short fiction of Tolstoy (1946) and Kafka (1952). It is hard to imagine an America in which “The Cult of Experience in American Writing” (1940) will not be a prime critical resource. It takes little imagination to transpose “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy” (1939) into terms the beginning 70’s can understand and profit from—consider this remark, for instance: “At that time the party saw the revolution as an immediate possibility, and its literature was extreme in its Leftism, aggressive, declamatory, prophetic.” The earliest piece in the book, the 1936 review of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, is still a model of critical procedure for those who because of passionate commitments are unable to distinguish between poetry and belief—or are unable to see that one of the greatest services a critic can perform for politics is to curb its tendency to acquire literature. Rahv has continued over the years to see in Eliot (as he puts it in his 1966 review of Eliot’s posthumous essays) “one of the principal educators of the imaginative life of his age, a uniquely great shaping influence both as poet and critic.” To be for Eliot, even with Rahv’s qualifications, is to court conspicuous enemies. He swells their ranks by referring to Jean Genet as a moral idiot, by admiring Orwell, and by refusing to accept F. R. Leavis’s estimate of D. H. Lawrence, or Hugh Kenner’s estimate of Pound’s Cantos, or John Aldridge’s estimate of Norman Mailer, or Maxwell Geismar’s estimate of Henry James, or Leslie Fiedler’s estimate of William Burroughs. No doubt for many Rahv is simply a once-influential critic who is no longer with it, who has missed the wave of the future. And they would be correct after their fashion. He is, I suspect, as little impressed with wave-of-the future notions as Orwell was, having gotten his dose of skepticism from the same medicine cabinet. To be with it, to swing, as he makes clear in his 1965 piece on Mailer, is to take the fickle moods of a permissive and self-deluded time at their own evaluation—an assignment for a publicist, not a critic. If he sometimes seems unduly pessimistic in his estimation of the swinging 60’s, the reason is not the conservatism of age, and certainly not failure of nerve, but moral seriousness combined with that tragic sense that once led him to quote with approval Freud’s conviction that “renunciation and suffering are not to be eluded by the race of men.” Such sentiments are unacceptable in many quarters, especially to those who, entranced with the vision of an outward-bound counter-culture, want their Freud filtered through Norman O. Brown. _____________ In any event, opponents anxious to find signs of deterioration in this critic had best avoid his 1968 essay “On F. R. Leavis and D. H. Lawrence.” Here, it seems to me, the intellectual vigor, the discriminate generosity, and the ability to keep a firm grasp on the line of argument while ranging over great expanses of literature were never more impressively on display. Criticism of this sort is exciting to read even when one does not agree with it, and not least because it demonstrates the possibility of redeeming the time with meaning, but without underestimating or belittling the forces that threaten it. Rahv has always demonstrated this possibility in a style that does not lend itself to quotation. Consider a sentence from “The Myth and the Powerhouse.” “True, in the imaginative act the artist does indeed challenge time, but in order to win he must be able to meet its challenge; and his triumph over it is like that blessing which Jacob exacted from the angel only after grappling with him till the break of day.” This is superb in its strong precision, in its tact, in its unostentatious balance and climax, in its harmony of idea and structure. But one becomes conscious of it only through an effort of the will that might isolate countless other sentences no less admirable. The style itself discourages such attention; like the book of which it is a proper model, it exists only as an instrument of clarification. Mischief Books Mischief Books is a small, family run shop in Waco, Texas. While we are primarily a book store, we also carry CDs, DVDs, Game & Hobby items, and memorabilia Our dream is to one day open a raccoon rehabilitation center. 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