The Critical Path [antikvár]

PrefaceThis book is a farce, in the etymological sense: a fifty-minute lecture stuffed with its own implications until it swelled into the present monograph. In the spring of 1968, while visiting the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, I gave a public lecture, which in turn engendered another lecture, "Mythos and Logos," given at the School of Letters in Indiana University that summer. These lectures form the basis of the present third and fourth sections, on the defence of poetry in Sidney and in Shelley. In the spring of 1969 I was visiting professor at Berkeley, on the Mrs. William Beckman foundation, and gave there two lectures which outlined the concern-and-freedom thesis. Meanwhile "student unrest" had been growing, and I was required to make several statements about it, of which the most relevant, to use that word, were addresses at Queen's University and at a conference at Quail Roost, Duke University, in the fall of 1968. These were published by, respectively, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Tavistock Press, in books entitled The Ethics of Change and Higher Education: Demand and Response (both 1969), and parts of their arguments reappear here.At that stage a long essay took shape, under its present title, which was contributed to a conference on the role of theory in humanistic studies held at Bellagio, Italy, in September, 1969, and published in the spring issue of Daedalus in 1970. During