ABOUT THIS BOOK

When he learned he had ALS and roughly two years to live, literary critic Mark Krupnick returned to the writers who had been his lifelong conversation partners and asked with renewed intensity: how do you live as a Jew, when, mostly, you live in your head? The evocative and sinuous essays collected here are the products of this inquiry. In his search for durable principles, Krupnick follows Lionel Trilling, Cynthia Ozick, Geoffrey Hartman, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and others into the elemental matters of life and death, sex and gender, power and vulnerability.

The editors—Krupnick’s wife, Jean K. Carney, and literary critic Mark Shechner—have also included earlier essays and introductions that link Krupnick’s work with the “deep places” of his own imagination.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mark Krupnick (1939-2003) was professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, editor of Displacement: Derrida and After, and author of Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism and more than two hundred essays and reviews.

REVIEWS

“Mark Krupnick’s great gift as a critic was his knack for cutting through the elaborate disguises writers throw up and seeing those writers as struggling human beings like the rest of us. This gift is beautifully on display in Mark’s wonderful and amazing final book.”—Gerald Graff, University of Illinois at Chicago

“Krupnick’s style is subtle and resists simple description. It is clear and unadorned, even when he writes about raucous texts like Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater. He was someone who did not feel the need for flashy effect; yet he reaches some invigorating heights.”—Eric Homberger, University of East Anglia

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Acknowledgments	000
Foreword by Jean K. Carney	000
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Preface by Mark Shechner	000
Introduction	000
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I. Jewish Writers and "The Deep Places of the Imagination"
"A Shit-Filled Life": Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater	000
"We Are Here to Be Humiliated": Philip Roth's Recent Fiction	000
Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth, and Holocaust Testimonies	000
Cynthia Ozick: Embarrassments	000
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II. Lionel Trilling and the Ordeal of Civility
Lionel Trilling and "The Deep Places of the Imagination"	000
The Trillings: A Marriage of True Minds?	000
Lionel Trilling and the Politics of Style	000
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III. Critics and Polemics
Philip Rahv: "He Never Learned to Swim"	000
Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe	000
The Two Worlds of Cultural Criticism	000
Edmund Wilson and Gentile Philo-Semitism	000
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IV. Portraits and Obits
Listmania in Humboldt's Gift	000
Assimilation in Recent American Jewish Autobiographies	000
Revisiting Morrie: Were His Last Words Too Good To Be True?	000
The Art of the Obituary	000
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V. Last Words
Why Are English Departments Still Fighting the Culture Wars?	000
Upon Retirement	000
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Biographical Summary	000
Publications	000

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