Bibliograph

The fate of ideas:, seductions, betrayals, appraisals, Robert Boyers

Type

Label

The fate of ideas:, seductions, betrayals, appraisals, Robert Boyers

Language

eng

Index

no index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

The fate of ideas:

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Responsibility statement

Robert Boyers

Sub title

seductions, betrayals, appraisals

Summary

As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society. Organizing his chapters around specific ideas, he anatomizes the process by which they fall in and out of fashion and often confuse those who most ardently embrace them. In provocative encounters with authority, fidelity, "the other," pleasure, and a wide range of other topics, Boyers tells colorful stories about his own life and, in the process, studies the fate of ideas in a society committed to change and ill-equipped to assess the losses entailed in modernity. Among the characters that appear in these pages are Susan Sontag and V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and J. M. Coetzee, as well as figures drawn from all walks of life, including unfaithful husbands, psychoanalysts, terrorists, and besotted beauty lovers

Target audience

adult

Classification