This study of contemporary art and culture brings together Boyers's sharply focused essays on writers, filmmakers, painters, and critics, first published in the _TLS_, _The American Scholar_, _Granta_, _The_ _American Poetry Review, and Salmagundi. The essays respond to the diversity of "events" that make up our cultural life, and take as their central theme what Boyers calls "object loss" in the art and writing of some prominent contemporaries. The term designates a radical incapacity to think clearly about the objects—actual or (...) imagined—that give a work point or focus. He argues that this incapacity has produced various kinds of irrelevance and dishonesty, not so much in the art of our day as in the various critical theories and response patterns which are dominant among us._ Dwelling on such figures as Jean-Luc Godard, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marcel Duchamp, John Ashbery, and William Styron, Boyers frequently casts his reflections as responses to theories that have gained—especially among contemporary literary intellectuals—an indisputable currency. His essays constitute a negative aesthetic, a "definition by recoil" of postmodernist art and the ideology that promotes or defends it. (shrink)

Boyers, R. and Orrill, R. Preface.--Rieff, P. The impoverishment of Western culture.--Rieff, P. Observations on the therapeutic.--Kolakowski, L. The psychoanalytic theory of culture.--Jones, J. Five versions of psychological man.--Cioran, E. M. Civilized man.--Jameson, F. Herbert Marcuse.--Beldoch, M. The therapeutic as narcissist.--Huizinga, J. Puerilism.--Brown, N. O. Rieff's "fellow teachers."--Nelson, B. and Wrong, D. Perspectives on the therapeutic in the context of contemporary sociology.--Sedgwick, P. Mental illness is illness.--Foucoult, M. History, discourse and discontinuity.

Introduction -- Authority -- Pleasure -- Reading from the life -- Fidelity -- Saving beauty -- My "others" -- Politics and the novel -- Realism -- The sublime -- Psychoanalysis -- Modernism -- Judgment.

Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is a precise and nuanced insider's look at shifts in American culture--most especially in the American academy--that so many people find alarming. Part memoir and part polemic, an anatomy of important and dangerous ideas, and a cri de coeur lamenting the erosion of standard liberal values, Boyers's collection of essays is devoted to such subjects as tolerance, (...) identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. Why, Robert Boyers asks, are a great many liberals, people who should know better, invested in the drawing up of enemies lists and driven by the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines."--Inside front book jacket flap. (shrink)