The Professor and Other Writings

From : In Character

Photo : humanexperience.stanford.edu




First - caveat lector - a confession: I, your reviewer, know my author rather well and must inform you here that I am to be, in the words of Jane Austen, the ur-lady scribbler herself, "a partial, prejudiced" critic.

My compromised objectivity, however, might serve to illustrate the aesthetic philosophy at work in Stanford English professor and London Review of Books essayist Terry Castle's beautiful new book of memoir qua literary criticism, The Professor and Other Writings. The Professor's philosophy of literature (and history, music, film, painting, intellectual idols) is deeply - at times, excruciatingly - personal. Castle's deliberate mingling of the personal and the aesthetic is itself an argument about how messy and intimate and inevitably personal the relationship between an intellectual and her objects of obsession and contemplation are. Kant did not get it entirely right when he argued that judgments about beauty are necessarily disinterested.

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