Pieces of Resistance [Paperback]

This collection of essays and reviews written between 1960 and 1985 are a deliberate response to the current, increasingly specialized forms of criticism.This collection of Eugene Goodheart's essays and reviews written between 1960 and 1985 responds to the political, cultural, and literary changes expressed during this period by novelists, critics, and journalists, such as Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, and V. S. Naipaul: writers he believes share a particular sensitivity to literary and cultural ideologies that distort and diminish our understanding of the world.This collection of Eugene Goodheart's essays and reviews written between 1960 and 1985 responds to the political, cultural, and literary changes expressed during this period by novelists, critics, and journalists, such as Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, and V. S. Naipaul: writers he believes share a particular sensitivity to literary and cultural ideologies that distort and diminish our understanding of the world. Criticism, as I understand and practice it, is evaluative as well as interpretive, writes Eugene Goodheart. Pieces of Resistance is a collection of Goodheart's essays and reviews written between 1960 and 1985. The book responds to the political, cultural, and literary changes expressed during this period by novelists, critics, and journalists. Goodheart's exemplary figures include Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, and V.S. Naipaul: writers he believes share a particular sensitivity to literary and cultural ideologies that distort and diminish our understanding of the world. Goodheart's book is divided into three parts. The first section discusses critics Trilling, Rahv, Leslie Fiedler, Geoffrey Hartman, David Bleich, and Susan Sontag--to name a few. The second part devotes itself to contemporary culture and includes essays on journals such as The New York Review of Books, Commentary, and The Evergreen Review, which in the 1960s and early 1970s provided a well-lit playground for various political, culturlse