Literature has passed through a crisis of confidence in recent decades—a radical questioning of its traditional values and its importance to humanity. In this witty and eloquent book, a distinguished professor of humanities looks at some of the agents that have contributed to literature's demise and ponders whether its vitality can be restored in the changing circumstances of late twentieth-century culture. Other critics, such as E. D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom, have also explored the growing cultural illiteracy of modern society. Alvin Kernan probes deeper, relating the death of literature to potent forces in our postindustrial world—most obviously, the technological revolution that is rapidly transforming a print to an electronic culture, replacing the authority of the written word with the authority of television, film, and computer screens. The turn taken by literary criticism itself, in deconstructing traditional literature and declaring it void of meaning in itself, and in focusing on what are described as its ideological biases against women and nonwhites, has speeded the disintegration. Recent legal debates about copyright, plagiarism, and political patronage of the arts have exposed the greed and self-interest at work under the old romantic images of the imaginative creative artist and the work of art as a perfect, unchanging icon. Kernan describes a number of the crossroads where literature and society have met and literature has failed to stand up. He discusses the high comedy of the obscenity trial in England against Lady Chatterley's Lover, in which the British literary establishment vainly tried to define literature. He takes alarmed looks at such agents of literary disintegration as schools where children who watch television eight hours a day can't read, decisions about who chooses and defines the words included in dictionaries, faculty fights about the establishment of new departments and categories of study, and courtrooms where criminals try to profit from bestselling books about their crimes. According to Kernan, traditional literature is ceasing to be legitimate or useful in these changed social surroundings. What is needed, he says, if it is any longer possible in electronic culture, is a conception of literature that fits in some positive way with the new ethos of post-industrialism, plausibly claiming a place of importance both to individual lives and to society as a whole for the best kind of writing.

The Death of Literature

Literature & Fiction

Kernan, Alvin

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Soon after James Stuart became king of England in 1603, William Shakespeare, while still working in the public theater, became the royal playwright, and his acting troupe became the premier playing company of the realm. How did this courtly setting influence Shakespeare's work? What was it like to view, perform in, and write plays conceived for the Stuart king? In this fascinating and lively book, one of our most eminent literary critics explores these questions by taking us back to the court performances of some of Shakespeare's most famous plays, examining them in their settings at the royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court. Alvin Kernan looks at Shakespeare as a patronage playwright whose work after 1603 focused on the main concerns of his royal patron: divine-right kingship in Lear, the corruption of the court in Antony, the difficulties of the old military aristocracy in Coriolanus, and other vital matters. Kernan argues that Shakespeare was neither the royal propagandist nor the political subversive that the New Historicists have made him out to be. He was, instead, a great dramatist whose plays commented on political and social concerns of his patrons and who sought the most satisfactory way of adjusting his own art to court needs.

Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613

Dramas & Plays

In this delightful and candid memoir, Alvin Kernan recalls his life as a student, professor, provost, and dean during a distinguished career in some of higher education’s most hallowed halls. With his customary wit and insight, Kernan recounts his experiences at Columbia, Williams, Oxford, Yale, and Princeton in the company of an array of fascinating colleagues. And he describes from an insider’s point of view how colleges and universities in the second half of the twentieth century have been transformed in radical ways. Against the background of what it was like to work and teach in turbulent decades of change, Kernan details the broader educational battles in which he became embroiled. He discusses the struggle for equality of opportunity for women and minorities; the questioning of administrative and intellectual authority; the appearance of deconstructive types of theory; the technological shift from printed to electronic information; the politicization of the classroom; and much more. His vividly remembered account is not only a unique personal story, it is a thought-provoking history that brims with insight into what has been won and lost in the culture wars.

In Plato's Cave

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

The beleaguered Joad family of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath struggled in an era of disappointed dreams and empty pockets. But how might the grandchildren of that Dust Bowl generation fare in today’s more promising times? In this boisterously inventive book Alvin Kernan sends various descendants of the original Joad family on a postmodern journey out of California and into the excesses of American culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The experiences of today’s Joads are as hilarious as they are discomfiting: they encounter in Kernan’s America a world of democracy gone haywire and social institutions in perplexing disarray. In ten satiric episodes, Kernan visits virtually every important American institution―the family, education, religion, art, the military, law courts, sex, science and medicine, politics, and not least television and its advertisements. Unsparing with his barbs, he reveals both the fools and the knaves among us. Kernan’s modern-day Joads find themselves in a distorted world where a surplus of democracy not only fails to free its inhabitants but also makes them vulnerable to the machinations of greedy and unscrupulous exploiters. Echoing the voices of such other provocative wits as Evelyn Waugh and Tom Wolfe, Kernan will make you laugh at the absurdity of American culture and―in all likelihood―at yourself.

The Fruited Plain: Fables for a Postmodern Democracy

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

The Battle of Midway is considered the greatest U.S. naval victory, but behind the luster is the devastation of the American torpedo squadrons. Of the 51 planes sent to attack Japanese carriers only 7 returned, and of the 127 aircrew only 29 survived. Not a single torpedo hit its target. A story of avoidable mistakes and flawed planning, The Unknown Battle of Midway reveals the enormous failures that led to the destruction of four torpedo squadrons but were omitted from official naval reports: the planes that ran out of gas, the torpedoes that didn’t work, the pilots who had never dropped torpedoes, and the breakdown of the attack plan. Alvin Kernan, who was present at the battle, has written a troubling but persuasive analysis of these and other little-publicized aspects of this great battle. The standard navy tactics for carrier warfare are revealed in tragic contrast to the actual conduct of the battle and the after-action reports of the ships and squadrons involved.

The Unknown Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons

History

Military

The Unknown Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons (Yale Library of Military History)

Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket's World War II Odyssey

Naval Inst Pr

Amid the host of personal memoirs published about World War II, Kernan's stands out as the classic description of an enlisted man's perspective of the great age of aircraft carriers. Crossing the Line conveys the realities of a sailor's life on a wartime carrier, relating the inveterate routines along with the moments of sheer terror that mobilized boys into fighting men. Kernan writes with unerring honesty of the enlisted man's struggle to survive with honor; the poor equipment, faulty tactics, and petty rules; the loneliness as well as the congenial interludes with crew mates; the escape sought in barroom brawls and brothels during liberty.

Naval_Institute_Press

Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket's World War II Odyssey (Bluejacket Books)

In one volume, three unforgettable memoirs that capture the brutality, fear, and heroism of the American land, air, and sea war in the Pacific.&nbsp; &nbsp; "Every generation is a secret society," former Marine pilot Samuel Hynes wrote. "The secret that my generation--the one that came of age during the Second World War--shared was simply the war itself." This volume brings together the powerful memoirs of three Americans who came of age fighting in the Pacific and who survived to tell their stories. Remarkable literary achievements that capture history with the immediacy of lived experience, all three--presented here in an illustrated collector's edition--are classics of the modern literature of war. &nbsp; &nbsp; In With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (1981) Marine veteran E. B. Sledge bears unflinching witness to the horror, fear, and degradation of prolonged close-quarters combat. A mortarman serving in a front-line rifle company, Sledge survived thirty days of nightmarish fighting on the remote coral island of Peleliu, where heat, thirst, filth, and fear and hatred of the Japanese "eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all." On Okinawa he faced an even greater test of endurance amid deep mud, driving rain, and incessant shelling, as men "fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell's own cesspool." Written with precision and clarity, Sledge's memoir is a haunting testament to his struggle to hold on to decency and sanity, and a moving tribute to the esprit de corps of the U.S. Marines. Flights of Passage (1988) is Samuel Hynes' evocative and elegiac memoir of his "fairly ordinary flying war." A "true believer in the religion of flight," he writes with lyricism, candor, and humor about the joys and dangers of his stateside training as a dive-bomber pilot, the beauty and excitement he experienced flying in combat over the Ryukyu Islands, and his wartime education in the realities of friendship, sex, love, and sudden, random death. &nbsp; Alvin Kernan enlisted in the Navy in 1941 at age seventeen to escape life on a failing Wyoming ranch. Crossing the Line (1994, revised 2007) is a vividly written account of his remarkable service on three aircraft carriers, first as an aviation ordnanceman and then as an air gunner. A perceptive and thoughtful observer of the sailor's life at sea and on shore, Kernan witnessed the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack and the launching of the Doolittle Raid, armed planes at Midway, survived the sinking of the Hornet, and flew on the final mission of the fighter ace Butch O'Hare. &nbsp; With thirty-two pages of photographs and endpaper maps. &nbsp;

World War II Memoirs: The Pacific Theater (LOA #351): With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa / Flights of Passage / Crossing the Line (The Library of America, 351)

Sledge, E.B.

HYNES, Samuel

Historical

Library of America

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kernan, Alvin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kernan, Alvin