Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine by Tom Wolfe

Author:Tom Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

In 1974, in one of his last speeches, the late Lionel Trilling, who was probably the most prestigious literary critic in the country and had been a professor of English at Columbia for thirty-five years, made what falls under the heading of “a modest proposal.” He suggested that the liberal-arts curriculum in the universities be abandoned for one generation.

His argument ran as follows: Children come to the university today, and they register, and they get the student-activity card and the map of the campus and the university health booklet, and just about as automatically they get a packet of cultural and political attitudes. That these attitudes are negative or cynical didn’t seem to be what worried Trilling. It was more that they are dispensed and accepted with such an air of conformity and inevitability. The student emerges from the university with a set of ready-mades, intact, untouched by direct experience. What was the solution? Well—why not turn off the packaging apparatus for a while? In time there might develop a generation of intelligent people who had experienced American life directly and “earned” their opinions.

Whether his proposal was serious or not, I couldn’t say. But somehow he made me think once more of the Lost Lad of the Great Plains, the Candide in Reverse,

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