N1BR: Issue 4

Charles Taylor
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Bruce Robbins

Taylor's respect for human feeling sometimes seems almost pathological. Yet there are all sorts of feelings that don't get respected nearly enough. One does not have to take a rosy Thomas Friedman-like view of contemporary capitalism to feel that Taylor has not done enough fieldwork among women or young people—that he is willfully blind to the various forms of good feeling that are both secular and at least as characteristic of our contradictory modernity as "malaise."

Michéle Lamont
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Amanda Claybaugh

The two unsuccessful disciplines are philosophy, which Lamont calls a "problem field," and English, which she claims is in crisis. Both fail to secure their share of fellowships because they fail to describe themselves in ways that other disciplines find persuasive. For English, the problem is that the discipline is too open. "I am coming from English," one panelist says, "and in English today anything goes."

Zoë Heller and Said Sayrafiezadeh
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Atossa Abrahamian

The Litvinoffs live in a comfortable West Village bubble punctuated with laughable criticisms from the right-wing press, but their seemingly sincere conviction that socialism will bring about greater social justice is what saves them from coming off as utterly reprehensible. It is clear that Heller sees the contradictions of leftist politics becoming an American lifestyle, but these are approached with wry humor, not contempt.

James Cuno and Lawrence Rothfield
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Alexander Bevilacqua

Encyclopedic museums are in no way intrinsically enlightening forces. They are only as good as their curators, and they can be and have been used to tell rather unappealing stories about the ranking of human societies. To reduce the history of the museum or even the encyclopedic art museum to a simple story of enlightenment and the championing of pluralist, democratic values is either an act of ignorance, which one doubts, or disingenuousness.

April Bernard
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Abigail Deutsch

Despite moments of despair, Bernard is pleasingly prone to clowning around. In Romanticism, she provides a series of fake translations of fake operas by fake composers. Few audience members, I imagine, would survive Claude DuFarge's "The Cossack's Bride" beyond intermission.

On Writing
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Arnon Grunberg

The book has its faults, yet I can still recommend it heartily to one and all. It is about seduction as a game, and the ironic fact that the game more or less ceases to be a game as soon as one starts taking it seriously. It is about the power of the word and the negation of the cliché, at the moment when the cliché is used to a different end and so takes on a new ambiguity. Perhaps it is also about how, if one looks carefully, almost everything boils down to the art of seduction, even though that art often presents itself in a different guise.