Back to put the dough in the oiled skillet in 15 minutes.
M.H.
Abrams, 2009.(Dale R. Corson)
M.H.
Abrams, the distinguished literary critic, died April 22, at age 102. This appraisal of the man and his work
by Tablet’s Adam Kirsch originally appeared on July 11, 2012, on the
occasion of M.H. Abrams’ 100th birthday.
***
When Henry James paid a visit to his
native country in 1905, after decades living in Europe, he was struck with a
kind of pious horror by the spectacle he found on the Lower East Side of New
York City. As a novelist, James was bothered most of all by his fear of what
these “swarming” Jews would mean for the future of the English language in
America. Visiting Yiddish cafés, he saw them “as torture-rooms of the living
idiom; the piteous gasp of which at the portent of lacerations to come could
reach me in any drop of the surrounding Accent of the Future.” To James, the
English language and English literature were the inalienable possession of the
Anglo-Saxon race—a common feeling that persisted long after James wrote. As
late as the 1930s, while Jews made up more than their share of Ivy League
students—and would have been even more overrepresented if not for quotas—they
were still virtually absent from the English faculty.
Then, almost overnight, everything
changed. Starting in the postwar years, anti-Semitism became intellectually
unrespectable, thanks to its association with Nazism and the Holocaust, while
the flood of new students entering the universities under the G.I. Bill meant
that there was an urgent need for new faculty. Jewish professors, critics, and
scholars were newly acceptable—Lionel Trilling studied Arnold at Columbia, and
Harry Levin studied Joyce at Harvard. Leon Edel wrote the biography of Henry
James, and Hershel Parker wrote the biography of Melville. Alfred Kazin
recovered the history of the American novel in On Native Grounds, a
title whose defiant claim could not be missed.
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